Reader's Block

by David Markson

  A difficulty, however, being that Reader senses he is evoking the image from half a century or more ago. Where such today?

  The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

  Take courage, Charlotte.

  Said Anne, dying only six months after Emily.

  Back to the things themselves.

  The baseball on Reader's windowsill was hit foul by Ted Williams at Yankee Stadium. Also in antiquity. Reader was with a girl named Fern Winters when it ricocheted off a concrete step and the arm of a seat directly to him.

  Sartre called John Dos Passos the greatest writer of their time.

  Is Reader perhaps recalling older neighborhoods in certain middling Hudson River towns like Kingston or Catskill or Saugerties, which in those days he knew slightly?

  Bucephalas.

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

  Thomas Traherne died in 1674. The manuscripts of his poems, never before published, were come upon on a bookseller's cart in 1897.

  Also in part a commonplace book?

  Also in part a cento, as Burton would surely have had it?

  The criminality at Aulis.

  Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of The Unquiet Grave?

  A man will turn over half a library to make one book, Johnson said.

  Lucian Freud was once married to Jacob Epstein's daughter. And once to a woman who later married Robert Lowell.

  The saints have their own country.

  Said Pascal.

  In an apartment far west in Greenwich Village. Heat. Molloy/Malone/Estragon sorting books and records, determining which he may dispose of before departing after all.

  Elizabeth Siddal died from an overdose of laudanum, very probably a suicide.

  Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch.

  There is no doubt that an English winter would put an end to me.

  Il Libro dell’ Arte.

  Della Pittura.

  Reader is well aware that sooner or later a decision had best be made between the cemetery and the beach.

  D. H. Lawrence was an anti-Semite.

  Petrarch owned a Virgin by Giotto. Leaving it to someone in his will, he felt it necessary to point out that the benighted would still not have learned to appreciate the artist.

  Jean Genet was illegitimate.

  H. H. Munro was killed by a sniper on the French front in 1916.

  In Canto IV of the Inferno, which is to say with 96 percent of his chief work yet unwritten, Dante has the temerity to rank himself sixth in the company of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan.

  Underestimating.

  Hannah Arendt:

  We cannot know if there is such a thing as altogether unappreciated genius, or whether it is the daydream of those who are not geniuses.

  Will Watt ever actually meet or at least speak with the woman who comes to the cemetery?

  Whose is the grave at which she visits?

  Aubrey Beardsley was dead of tuberculosis at twenty-five.

  Is it not passing brave to be a king,

  And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

  Melville worked as a customs inspector in Manhattan for nineteen years, out of an office on West Street near Gansevoort. His highest wage was never more than four dollars a day.

  Gansevoort Street was named after a hero of the Revolutionary War. Melville's maternal grandfather.

  All life is sorrowful.

  Are the Wandering Rocks in the Odyssey ice floes from the Dnieper or the Don that have drifted into the Black Sea?

  Protagonist nodded hello to the woman from the grave in passing on the street yesterday.

  Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.

  In fact Protagonist has any number of friends.

  Among the living and accessible.

  Even if he has never quite been able to articulate for himself precisely why or even when it was that he commenced to fall out of touch.

  With some of whom in what now appears a virtually separate incarnation he spent time endlessly.

  Archimedes had to be dragged by main force to take a bath.

  Sir John Denham once saved George Wither from being hanged by pleading that so long as Wither was alive, he, Denham, could never be the worst poet in England.

  Paul de Man was an anti-Semite.

  Except for Aquinas and the Bible, Descartes almost never read a word. He called the classics a waste of time.

  The best critic and human being I’ve known in my life was my dear friend Paul de Man.

  Had said Harold Bloom before de Man's pro-Nazi World War II writings were discovered.

  Kol Nidre.

  Hadrian's Animula, vagula, blandula. Which Reader was surprised to find Stevie Smith had done a translation of.

  Though he remotely knew Byron's.

  Shall I, wasting in despair,

  Die because a woman's fair?

  Keats may have been born above a livery stable.

  Cennino d'Andrea Cennini.

  Leon Battista Alberti.

  Certain writers' saloons near that Greenwich Village apartment would Protagonist have spent some of that other incarnation in?

  Camus died in a car crash.

  Ortwin de Graef.

  A Yorkshire bishop convened a public burning of Jude the Obscure.

  Probably in his despair at not being able to burn me, Hardy said.

  The White Horse Tavern?

  The Lion's Head?

  Anne Sexton sexually abused her older daughter.

  Skibet Guar Videre.

  The Viareggio?

  Gentlemen, old Bach is here!

  Christopher Smart. Mad, lice-infested, incising A Song to David and the Jubilate Agno into the wainscotting of a jail cell.

  Known before that for insisting upon being joined in prayer wherever the impulse struck him, even at street corners. Or more ideally in rain.

  Frieda von Richthofen.

  Legend eternally insists that Cleopatra committed suicide by pressing an asp to her bosom. Plutarch suggests that it may have been by taking poison, however.

  Finnegans Wake, sans apostrophe. Finnegans ergo a plural noun, Wake a verb.

  Joyces write. Readers read.

  Fernand Leger was gassed while serving as a stretcher-bearer in World War I.

  Fuit Ilium,

  I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as anyone else, Johnson said.

  What things have we seen

  Done at the Mermaid!

  Charmian and Iras committed suicide when Cleopatra did.

  Lorenzo da Ponte ended his days teaching Italian at what would later become Columbia University.

  Could Protagonist possibly have taught somewhere at some time also?

  Columbia likewise?

  Schopenhauer was an anti-Semite.

  Austerlitz. Smolensk. Borodino.

  Tycho Brahe wore a silver alloy nose. The bridge of his own had been severed in a duel.

  Horseflies that keep the horse from plowing, Chekhov called critics.

  Hendrickje Stoffels was illiterate.

  Hailey, Idaho, Ezra Pound was born in.

  Saskia.

  August 2, 1492. The deadline set by Ferdinand and Isabella for the expulsion of all Jews who did not convert to Catholicism. August 3, 1492. Columbus sailed.

  F. O. Matthiessen committed suicide in a plunge from a window.

  Jeremy Bentham's skeleton is on display at University College, London.

  In Bentham's clothes.

  Protagonist's son or daughter may one day want his books.

  Some few? The better volumes of art reproductions?

  Rudolf Nureyev was an anti-Semite.

  Caddy held me. She smelled like trees.

  Galileo had three illegitimate children.

  From certain angles, the knotted root on Reader's windowsill looks like a hand grasping in supplication. A wo
man named Kate Winter plucked it from an eddy at an embankment of the Ebro where Reader and she had paused during a long day's driving.

  Freud had thirty-three operations for cancer on his mouth and throat.

  Joyce had twenty-five operations on his eyes.

  Excluding the minor coincidence of their names, there is no connection between the Fern Winters at Yankee Stadium and the Kate Winter in Spain. Reader knew them decades apart.

  No ideas but in things.

  George Sanders committed suicide.

  Gabriella Mistral once lived in Roslyn Harbor, Long Island.

  Bach and Handel were born in the same year.

  Wagner and Verdi were born in the same year.

  François Villon was born in the year Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.

  On mourra seul.

  Could a woman with one leg, on crutches, navigate in the sand of a beach?

  The word philosopher translates from the Greek as lover of wisdom. Pythagoras is credited with having originated its usage.

  Auden married Thomas Mann's daughter Erika, whom he had never until then met, so that she could evade the Nazis through British citizenship.

  Djuna Barnes had no formal education whatsoever.

  Will Protagonist have spent time in Spain also?

  Dostoievsky's father was the resident physician at a hospital for the poor. But treated his own serfs so abusively that a group of them ultimately murdered him.

  I would prefer not to.

  Roncesvalles. The story perhaps not being entirely mythical. An actual nephew of Charlemagne's named Roland in fact probably having existed.

  To reproduce the exterminating gesture.

  When Poe, at twenty-seven, married his cousin Virginia Clemm, she was thirteen. And consumptive.

  In Germany not much earlier Novalis had been engaged to a girl of twelve. Who died, however.

  David Gascoyne spent two decades in mental hospitals.

  We have too many things and not enough forms, Flaubert said.

  H. G. Wells was an anti-Semite.

  Manitas de Plata.

  Dante situates Mohammed in the ninth chasm of the Malebolge for having sown division in the Church. He is seen slashed open from his chin to his anus and with his innards spilling out.

  In retaliation, Muslim fundamentalists in the early 1990s threatened to blow up Dante's tomb in Ravenna.

  Seven hundred years after the fact.

  Rosso Fiorentino committed suicide.

  Benedetto Croce's parents were killed in an earthquake.

  Will Reader make anything out of that notion of Protagonist having seen the woman from the grave on the street?

  Contrive something with more immediacy than that?

  Bertrand Russell and Basil Bunting were conscientious objectors in World War I.

  Robert Lowell and Kenneth Rexroth were conscientious objectors in World War II.

  Here. This isn't a musical peepshow. And don't you smash that piano. Who's paying here?

  The first books printed in England, roughly four decades after Gutenberg, were a history of the Trojan War and a volume on chess. Both set by Caxton.

  Raoul le Fevre. Guido della Colonne. Benoit de Sainte-Maure.

  Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.

  The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.

  If Protagonist has in fact taught, it will have been only briefly. And/or part-time. Possibly in writing programs.

  That and his few other past employments leaving him with no kind of retirement benefits.

  And no more than minimal Social Security.

  Caxton me fieri fecit.

  The primary aim of this book is to explain the remarkable rule which regulated the succession to the priesthood of Diana at Aricia.

  Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul

  When hot for certainties in this our life!

  Not one of the violent moments in Greek tragedy occurs on stage. Medea murdering her sons, for instance. Or Orestes bloodying Clytemnestra.

  Does Reader yet know how long Protagonist has now been alone?

  Who, when, the last woman in his life will have been?

  Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.

  Pio Baroja was an anti-Semite.

  Magdalena Abakanowicz.

  Melville. A little heterodox in the matter of clean linen.

  Said Hawthorne.

  Coleridge. Considerably more so.

  Said several.

  Sara Teasdale committed suicide with sleeping pills.

  Could the woman who appears at the grave be the woman with one leg?

  What belated queer obsession of Reader's is this?

  Jacqueline du Pre's cello was a Stradivarius.

  And was later Yo-Yo Ma's.

  Balzac called Ann Radcliffe a better novelist than Stendhal.

  God is dead, everything is permitted.

  Preoccupied, Beethoven was known to lather his face and then forget to shave.

  He also possessed an unstrung piano, adequate in his deafness.

  Ernst Toller hanged himself.

  Mr. Earbrass.

  Jim Thorpe is buried in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania.

  Isaac Newton's father was illiterate.

  Curiously, there is no refrigeration in that part of Kingston as Reader sees it, instead there are old-fashioned iceboxes. Meaning deliveries by truck of blocks of ice.

  Does Reader now have some notion of setting his novel back practically a lifetime ago?

  Or is memory merely getting in the way of imagination for a minute?

  Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

  Said Faulkner.

  Probably it will not be Kingston in any case.

  Frank Plumpton Ramsey was dead at twenty-six.

  Robert Frost had exactly five poems accepted in the first seventeen years in which he was submitting.

  Heinrich Schliemann. Sir Arthur Evans. Carl Blegen.

  Saint Augustine was an anti-Semite.

  Why is this night different from all other nights?

  From Rabelais's will:

  I have nothing. I owe much. The rest I leave to the poor.

  Shelley once insisted he had seen the devil leaning against a tree on his lawn.

  And eyes staring at him from Mary's breasts.

  Hippo is now a town in Algeria called Bone.

  Willard Hershberger slashed his throat with a straight razor in a Boston hotel room.

  The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

  Which would have been virtually the day before yesterday, in the period Reader is thinking of.

  Thales of Miletus was believed to have predicted an eclipse of the sun for May 28, 585 B.C.

  Evident as it is, why is Reader surprised to so rarely make the connection between aphrodisiac and Aphrodite?

  Mathilde Wesendonck.

  Nadezhda von Meek.

  A miniature American flag, fixed beside one of the graves.

  A completely unabridged performance of Les Troy ens was not given until 1969, exactly one hundred years after Berlioz died.

  It had taken almost that long for Bach's Mass in B Minor to be done completely also.

  For Protagonist's past. The girl named Fern Winters, lovely though fragile, who tolerated baseball games? Was she twenty-two when Reader last saw her?

  Also Kate Winter then, strikingly handsome. And some few years more than twice Fern's age, meaning a good deal nearer to Protagonist's present.

  Plus fictionalized names for each, if only provisionally?

  Sonia Marmeladov. Catherine Earnshaw.

  Matisse called Les Demoiselles d'Avignon a hoax.

  Thales might have been a Hebrew, Herodotus thought.

  I do not believe in God, though I believe in Picasso, said Diego Rivera.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins died of typhoid fever in 1889. One of his brothers would live into the 1950s.

  A verray, parfit gentil knyght.