Reader's Block

by David Markson

  When Hemingway committed suicide, it was by leaning to press his forehead against the barrels of a shotgun braced at the floor.

  Thirty-odd years earlier his father had used a revolver.

  Thomas Babington Macaulay and Horatius at that bridge to the contrary, Lars Porsena did conquer Rome.

  By the nine gods he swore.

  Has Reader made any sort of decision about how long Protagonist's small money will last?

  And?

  Else Lasker-Schuler's tombstone at the Mount of Olives was uprooted when that part of Jerusalem was taken by Arab forces in 1948. The grave was never again located.

  In his mid-twenties, Verdi lost his wife and two infant children within a space of two years.

  In the decade before his death, Ad Reinhardt painted nothing but black canvases.

  Alessandro Stradella was murdered.

  no symbols where none intended

  Benvenuto Cellini was once released from prison, after having killed, because a Pope needed some engraving.

  And was thrown back in after insulting the Pope's taste.

  Degas's mother was born in New Orleans.

  Thou sayest it.

  Protagonist's obsolescent phonograph. And scarred long-playing records, never surrendered for compact discs.

  Nor will there be a VCR.

  Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?

  Ecole Normale Superieure.

  May 30, 1431:

  Rouen, Rouen, O thou, my last dwelling place!

  The devious-cruising Rachel.

  Pierre Reverdy spent thirty years as a lay brother in a Benedictine monastery.

  Though with his Poems in Frank O'Hara's pocket.

  From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.

  The Bay Psalm Book.

  Keats wrote the four great odes in one month.

  Taking details for the urn from a painting by Claude Lorrain.

  Ernestine Schumann-Heink had sons fighting on both sides in World War I.

  The son fighting for the Germans was killed.

  We are lost. We have burned a saint.

  Guido Cavalcanti died of malaria.

  Kazantzakis's sequel to the Odyssey contains 33,333 lines.

  Clara Westhoff.

  Emily Dickinson told Thomas Wentworth Higginson that she had not read Whitman. But had heard he was disgraceful.

  Has Reader decided if Protagonist will have ever seen Becky Sharp in later life? When did he last see Daisy Buchanan?

  Another, for him?

  Here, from not that long ago. A woman named Liz, who sculpted. And with a face so finely boned that even past midlife the chiaroscuro in certain light could make his breath catch.

  Temple Drake. Constance Chatterley.

  Though where now is Connie Chatterley too then?

  Plato left behind seven different versions of the opening sentence of the Republic.

  André Gide was an anti-Semite.

  Vitelli.

  Chick Stahl committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid.

  In his mid-thirties, Edwin Arlington Robinson was working ten hours a day on the construction of a New York subway. Checking materials for twenty cents an hour.

  Bishop Berkeley once lived in Rhode Island.

  Franz Marc was killed by a grenade at Verdun.

  Youth.

  For Exmoor.

  Could the entire town to all intents have become a depressed area? Any local industry extinct, stores or even certain private dwellings boarded up?

  Surely then conveying a sense almost of recession into the past?

  The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree.

  I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing.

  Jonathan Edwards was an anti-Semite.

  While acknowledging he had never met one.

  It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.

  The only twentieth-century novelist from whom he always learned something, Lionel Trilling called E. M. Forster.

  E. M. Forster was thirty years old before he knew the facts of life.

  Infinite riches in a little room.

  Menander would drown at the Piraeus.

  Virgil worked on the Aeneid for eleven years.

  And said near his death that it was not finished and should be burned.

  Joseph Michael Medwick.

  Clover Adams committed suicide.

  Basquiat.

  Sinon. Who lied.

  The Lover, which Reader little more than skimmed. Yet tones, images of light and shadow, loss. Abstractly lingering.

  Gulley Jimson.

  The sun don't shine on the same dog's ass all the time.

  Quintus of Smyrna, the Posthomerica. Which is to say, what happened next. From the burial of Hector to the shipwreck of the Greeks en route home. Thought to be fourth century a.d.

  There is no death and art can prove it.

  Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.

  Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

  I came to Comala because I was told that my father, a certain Pedro Paramo, was living here.

  Irina Ratushinskaya. At twenty-eight, as late as in 1982, sentenced to seven years in the strictest of Russian prison camps.

  For writing verse deemed unsuitable to the state.

  Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

  Some of the battle descriptions in the later books of the Aeneid do perhaps come off as perfunctory.

  If that was what Virgil had in mind?

  For reasons unknown, John Wycliffe escaped being burned as a heretic. Though forty years after his death his remains were dug up and dumped into the River Swift.

  Which flows into the Avon.

  Jimmy Whistler, he was naturally called.

  Rubens often had the Latin classics read to him while he was working.

  Canova later did the same.

  Schopenhauer's first published work was his dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

  His novelist mother said it sounded like something for druggists.

  George Santayana was an anti-Semite.

  It is virtually certain that Lucrezia Borgia never poisoned anyone. Or committed incest. Victor Hugo and Gaetano Donizetti notwithstanding.

  Why is the red wheelbarrow beside the white chickens rather than vice versa?

  Enter Caesar, in his nightgown.

  Hannah Wilke's final exhibition.

  Randall Jarrell is assumed a suicide. He would appear to have stepped quite deliberately into the path of the car that killed him.

  Well he kept her there in a bath

  With a gallon of lysol in a bath

  Gerald died that afternoon.

  Victor Hugo, hélas!

  Utrillo once pawned Modigliani's only decent clothes to buy wine.

  Ernest L. Thayer majored in philosophy under William James at Harvard.

  C. P. Cavafy lived with his mother until he was thirty-six.

  No, no! said the Queen. Sentence first—verdict afterwards.

  The man himself lay in the bed.

  Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in an infantry charge in France in 1915.

  T. S. Eliot's father manufactured bricks.

  William H. McGuffey.

  William H. Bonney.

  Levi-Strauss:

  The invention of melody is the supreme mystery of man.

  Jackson Pollock once held a job cleaning bird droppings from statues in New York parks.

  Work out your own salvation with diligence.

  For all his madness, it would turn out that Holderlin had furtively kept all of Suzette Gontard's letter
s throughout the forty years between her death and his own. Eighty years after that they would come to be published.

  And somewhere men are laughing, and

  somewhere children shout.

  Tennyson said that scissors was the one word in the English language he could not rhyme.

  Raphael, Caravaggio, Watteau, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec each died at thirty-seven.

  Ronsard was so prodigally admired during his lifetime that both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots sent him gifts. And then was unread for two centuries.

  Boswell's practice of scribbling down every other word Johnson said irritated any number of their acquaintances. Ill-bred, Hester Thrale called him.

  W. H. Davies lost a foot while jumping a freight train.

  Men never do evil so completely and so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

  Said Pascal.

  Pythagoras claimed to remember visiting Hades between his several alleged reincarnations.

  And having seen Homer hanging from a tree and Hesiod in chains because of their disrespect for the gods.

  In Gargantua, Epistemon makes the same visit. Reporting that Achilles is a beggar, Hector supports himself by scraping pots in a kitchen, Helen is a madame, Alexander darns socks, Cleopatra sells onions, and King Arthur cleans grease out of hatbands.

  According to Xenophanes, Pythagoras also once asked someone to stop striking a puppy because he recognized the voice of a dead friend in its yelping.

  It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

  And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

  At least one more for Protagonist's background?

  Again then, not infinitely long past. A woman named Susan, who edited books. But also snapped some photographs of him that will presumably now remain the last he will ever have had taken.

  Brett Ashley.

  Anna Wickham committed suicide.

  Stephen Foster died after a fall in a rooming house on the Bowery.

  He owned thirty-eight cents.

  Seneca was an anti-Semite.

  Jacques Derrida. Roland Barthes. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Roman Jakobson. Michel Leiris. Julia Kristeva. Phillipe Sollers. Louis Althusser. Paul Ricoeur.

  All variously attended seminars of Jacques Lacan's.

  Yannis Ritsos. Iannis Xenakis.

  Jeanne Hebuterne, with child, jumped from a window on the morning after Modigliani's death.

  I am growing older. I have been in hospitals. Are there things to be put down?

  David Smith died in a car crash.

  The sitter for the Mona Lisa was one Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Francesco del Giocondo.

  Presumably her eyebrows were plucked.

  James Russell Lowell was an anti-Semite.

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

  Napoleon told Goethe he had read The Sorrows of Young Werther seven times.

  Trying to articulate for himself precisely why or even when it was that he commenced to fall out of touch.

  Not to call. Not to go. Not to do.

  Or was he not even that fully aware of the process until he found it to be a fait accompli?

  The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.

  Cosimo Tura died in a poorhouse.

  Discordia concors.

  Anne Hathaway was twenty-six when she told Shakespeare she was pregnant.

  Shakespeare was eighteen.

  Casta diva.

  Aristotle was born in the first year of the ninety-ninth Olympiad and died in the third year of the hundred and fourteenth.

  Ergo having been either sixty-two or sixty-three.

  He may also have died a suicide. Diogenes Laertius says he drank wolfsbane. Though most other sources blame chronic indigestion.

  The Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell sold two copies.

  Guido Reni.

  Who was once as widely admired as Ronsard.

  The reign of the shopwindow, Ortega called it as long ago as in 1930.

  Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels—bring home.

  It cost Baudelaire five years of letters and poems to coax Madame Sabatier into bed. Once. Whatever calamity occurred, the affair was terminated on the same night.

  Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers

  From those brown hills have melted into spring.

  Arnold Schoenberg was once turned down for a Guggenheim fellowship.

  Pier della Vigna committed suicide after Frederick II had him blinded. Dante confronts him with much sympathy in the Inferno.

  Raymond Radiguet wrote Devil in the Flesh at seventeen. And was dead at twenty.

  Henry James was bored by Crime and Punishment.

  Wagner was an anti-Semite.

  Mariano Azuela, as a physician, rode with Pancho Villa.

  Dies Irae.

  Kafka laughed repeatedly when he was reading his own work.

  Milena Jesenska died at Ravensbriick.

  The one describes what has happened, the other what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophical and serious than history.

  Dasjudentum in derMusik.

  Humphrey Cobb was wounded, and gassed twice, in World War I. Paths of Glory was his only book.

  At the gatehouse, the window near which Protagonist generally chooses to sit looks out on the graves rather than on the street.

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

  Frequently he will walk the nearby deserted streets in snow.

  Ignis fatuus.

  Moses spoke with a stutter. As did Virgil.

  And Somerset Maugham. And Philip Larkin.

  Raphael's birth and death both occurred on Good Friday.

  I hope you are getting some exercise and listening to music, dear Salman.

  Early in the Iliad, on the battlements above the Scaean Gate, Helen points out the several Greek chieftains for the benefit of King Priam.

  After the siege has ostensibly been in effect for a decade.

  Bartlebooth.

  Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire in a mental hospital in Ashe-ville, North Carolina.

  Our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung.

  Yevgeny Yevtushenko was once married to Bella Akhmadulina.

  Does one know today with whom Columbus sailed when he discovered America?

  Said Freud after his break with Jung.

  The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines.

  Beatrice Silverman.

  Adele Morales.

  Lady Jean Campbell.

  Beverly Bentley.

  Carol Stevens.

  Norris Church.

  Romain Roiland, on Kathe KoUwitz: the voice of the silence of the sacrificed.

  Leave the bum be. He's just drunk.

  October 12, 1492. At 2 a.m., the lookout on the Pinta.

  Named Rodrigo de Triana.

  No light; but rather darkness visible.

  Leonard Warren collapsed and died, on stage, during a performance of La Forza del Destino at the Metropolitan Opera.

  Even in the worst of snows, Protagonist is hatless.

  Elizabeth Shaw Melville:

  Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.

  Watching abstractedly among the ancient oaks as the entire cemetery commences to disappear.

  Bertha Mason. Thornfield Hall.

  Semper incumbebat libris. Spoken of Abelard.

  Not realizing that one's future is already one's present even as that too is dissolving into past.

  This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Two years after the book's appearance Borowski committed suicide.

  Via gas.

  Raymond Chandler was so obsessive about typo-free manuscripts that to cut down on the amount of his retyping he finally worked on half pages.