Reader's Block

by David Markson

  And as an incidental personal challenge, letting none of its intellectual mishegaas be material Reader has ever used anywhere else.

  Lector Ludens.

  Henry Purcell was Gerard Manley Hopkins's favorite composer.

  Bricolage.

  Yeats could never finish reading Ulysses.

  Poetry is not written with ideas, Degas, it is written with words.

  Mohammed was an anti-Semite.

  Literate people who can spend hours in one's home without a single glance at the titles on the bookshelves.

  F. R. Leavis was so severely shell-shocked as a stretcher-bearer in World War I that for a time he was incapable of speech.

  Gypo Nolan.

  Ite, missa est.

  You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.

  Said Charles Darwin's father.

  Robin Hyde committed suicide.

  Evelyn Waugh was found dead on a bathroom floor.

  Protagonist having come upon his own name on one of the graves, though with meaningless remote dates?

  And?

  Wastebasket.

  The Lord of the Flies was rejected by twenty-one publishers.

  The first time I saw Wystan Auden his socks didn't match.

  Herophilia, the Sibyl at Cumae, who lived a thousand years. And wished to die.

  As Eliot discovered in Petronius.

  Though how is Reader aware that while Cumae no longer exists the Sibyl's cave still does?

  Where Aeneas visited it. Northwest of Naples.

  Johan Emanuel Schikaneder.

  Spatial Form in Modern Literature.

  Protagonist's friends. From that life that was.

  And among those who had moved to distant places and one had gradually ceased to hear from even then?

  At Protagonist's age, how long before one begins to suspect that some of them, also, are even now dead?

  We are now able to suggest an explanation for the proverb There are many Manii in Aricia.

  Hemingway: I just called to tell you I got that thing.

  General Buck Lanham: That thing? What thing?

  Hemingway: That Swedish thing, you know?

  That Swedish thing. The Nobel Prize for Horses' Backsides.

  Voltaire was illegitimate.

  Late in her career, Kirsten Flagstad recorded a Tristan und Isolde in which the high Cs she had been missing repeatedly on stage were all reached magnificently.

  Having been sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and dubbed in.

  August Heat.

  At Protagonist's age, how long before one realizes that more of the people one had ever known anywhere are in fact now dead than alive?

  Mary Powell.

  Katherine Woodcock.

  Elizabeth Minshull.

  A title for all this, has Reader by chance yet given any thought to?

  Thomas Heggen committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills.

  I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail.

  Tess Durbeyfield.

  Mr. Flood's Party?

  Not Waving but Drowning?

  The Shrine of the Little Flower. Royal Oak, Michigan.

  The Temptation to Exist?

  In 1666, a committee in the House of Commons was ready to call both the Plague and the Great Fire God's retribution against England for harboring an atheist such as Thomas Hobbes.

  Who played tennis until he was seventy-five.

  Jung was an anti-Semite.

  Antony threw himself on his sword after the defeat at Actium and the subsequent desertion of most of his troops.

  Go faster, Jesus, why dost thou linger?

  I indeed am going, but thou shalt tarry till I come.

  Right Views.

  Right Intentions.

  Right Speech.

  Right Conduct.

  Right Livelihood.

  Right Effort.

  Right Remembrance.

  Right Contemplation.

  Avicenna studied Aristotle's Metaphysics so exhaustively and for so long that when he believed he finally fully understood it he handed out gifts to the poor in celebration.

  Joaquin Rodrigo was blind from the age of three.

  Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

  Now and again, an image, still, flitting into Protagonist's consciousness? Tanaquil Le Clercq, Ravel's La Valse?

  At thirty-nine, when his first wife died, Monet was so poverty-stricken he could not afford the few centimes to redeem a pawned locket that he knew she wished to be buried with, and had to borrow.

  Heifetz was playing the Mendelssohn E minor concerto by the age of six.

  Joyce had lost all his teeth by the age of forty-one.

  More than one owner of a significant personal library, in the early years after Gutenberg, made it plain that no printed volume would ever be a part of it.

  The Times of London officially listed Robert Graves as killed in action in 1916.

  Graves would live until 1985.

  Ella Sagersdorf.

  For most of his life, Beethoven changed addresses on an average of more than twice a year.

  And was more than once sued by landlords for having scribbled notations all over his walls.

  All men by nature desire to know.

  Krakatoa.

  Eliot was sixty-eight when he married his second wife Valerie. Who was thirty.

  Du musst dein Leben andern.

  Leigh Hunt once went to jail for libel.

  Virginia Hill committed suicide.

  Concierto de Aranjuez.

  You wanna walk in a parade? Everybody's lonely.

  Xerxes, invading Greece, halted at the site of Troy in homage to its heroes. Looking on the Trojan War as a European invasion of Asia which justified Persia's own present aggression.

  Seven centuries afterward.

  Karl Barth was an anti-Semite.

  Là ci darem la mano.

  How is Protagonist's eyesight?

  Apparently no one has ever believed Vasari's story that Filippo Lippi was once held prisoner by Barbary pirates but released when he astonished their leader by drawing his portrait.

  Has Reader at least made a decision about giving Protagonist some sort of literary past?

  Even if only from a good number of years back?

  The leprosy of letters, Flaubert called critics.

  Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly.

  Arshile Gorky hanged himself.

  Initially, the word metaphysics meant only that which came behind the Physics in the Aristotle canon. An early editor made use of it for lack of better.

  Tertullian has it that Democritus deliberately blinded himself in old age by staring into the sun. So as not to suffer the sight of beautiful women he could no longer possess.

  But O that I were young again

  And held her in my arms!

  Two years after that condemnation of Hobbes, Samuel Pepys would find Leviathan selling, secondhand, for four times its original price:

  It being a book the Bishops will not let be printed again.

  Gidon Kremer.

  For Protagonist's literary past:

  Protagonist: Isn't it awfully long since Caitlin went to the ladies' room?

  Dylan Thomas: She's probably in that other saloon across the street. Go buy her a drink and tell her I apologize for ignoring her, will you? She'll let off less steam if it's you instead of me.

  William Ernest Henley lost a leg to bone disease.

  Mikhail Bakhtin lost a leg to bone disease.

  Melville's older son Malcolm committed suicide at eighteen.

  Sarah Gamp was William Faulkner's favorite fictional character.

  Dirty stinking Degenerate Bobs was here from Boston, North End, Mass. Warp son of a bitch.

  The Duchess of Medina Sidonia. Whom Reader once saw at zparado
r on the Costa del Sol, being escorted to jail after political protest.

  Young Lochinvar.

  Frank O'Hara died after being hit by a jeep on the beach at Fire Island.

  Unquestionably, Protagonist will have spent time in Spain.

  Wolf Solent.

  La Duquesa Roja.

  Claude Lorrain was very nearly illiterate.

  John Greenleaf Whittier to the contrary, the woman in Frederick, Maryland, who displayed a Union flag when Stonewall Jackson entered the town was a Mrs. Mary Quantrell.

  Pushkin's dramatic poem in which an envious Salieri poisons Mozart.

  Rimsky-Korsakov's opera based on same.

  Dan Pagis. Nathan Zach.

  Frank Stella: What you see is what you see.

  Georg Buchner died of typhus in 1837, at twenty-three. Woyzeck would not be published until forty-two years later.

  Who touches a hair of yon grey head

  Dies like a dog! March on! he said.

  Malcolm Melville had played on a local baseball team. This when Melville himself was already in the customs sheds, and with virtually all of his fiction ten and fifteen years behind him.

  No image arises of the somber, disregarded author rooting on the sidelines at a game.

  Michael Ventris died in a car crash.

  Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother.

  Did the woman herself ever see the photograph?

  Yeats died in southern France in 1939. His body was returned to Ireland on an Irish destroyer after World War II.

  Pier Angeli committed suicide.

  Joe Orton was murdered.

  All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

  Bernal Diaz del Castillo.

  Agnes von Kurowsky.

  Now I know you. No field, no home, no wife, no woman—no friends, no love.

  Jacques Louis David was repeatedly drawn to sketch prisoners being led to the guillotine.

  Isadora Duncan was strangled when her long scarf became caught in a wheel of her open Bugatti.

  God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!

  Linear B.

  Dear me, I am about to become a god.

  Karl Marx was an anti-Semite.

  Karl Marx was descended on both sides from long lines of rabbis and Talmudic scholars.

  Zyklon B.

  Charles Martel.

  Benjamin Robert Haydon committed suicide.

  On the evidence, Shakespeare's small Latin was plainly more than that.

  Oft did I weary of wrestling with thee.

  Carved an unknown galley slave into an oar.

  And Rudyard Kipling into his desk.

  At the house on the beach, what becomes of Protagonist's path to the highway when the snows are heavier than those Reader has visualized?

  What is the winter really like, precisely at ocean's edge?

  He stank so badly, though we were great chums

  I had to leave him; then rats ate his thumbs.

  Watching abstractedly before the dunes as the entire shore commences to disappear?

  Roger van der Weyden signed none of his paintings.

  Either as Roger van der Weyden or Rogier de la Pasture.

  J

  oyce was influential enough to be able to aid at least a dozen Jews in escaping from Nazi Germany. Hermann Broch among them.

  Tekiah. Shevarim. Teruah. Tekiab.

  It remains a scandal to philosophy that there is as yet no satisfactory proof of an external world, Kant said.

  Does Protagonist continue to walk the beach at his usual hour now also?

  But surely not at this time of year a woman who does the same?

  Robert Lowell died of a heart attack in a taxi.

  After his cremation, Gandhi's ashes were scattered into the Ganges, considered sacred. At Allahabad.

  Where it and the Jumna conjoin.

  Ruth Kligman, who was thrown clear in the crash that killed Jackson Pollock and a friend of hers, later had an affair with Willem de Kooning.

  And later had an affair with Franz Kline.

  Caponegro. Latiolais.

  Darling Jill.

  Robert Louis Stevenson died of a cerebral hemorrhage at forty-four, but had been emaciated by tuberculosis before that. A bundle of sticks in a bag, Henry Adams said he looked like.

  Doch das Sein—was ist das Sein?

  Isaac Babel disappeared in one of Stalin's purges. Nothing whatsoever is known about his death.

  Conversely, orders allegedly given by Stalin in regard to Pasternak: Don't touch the cloud-dweller.

  Women have, in general, no love of any art; they have no proper knowledge of any; and they have no genius.

  Said Rousseau.

  When Stalin himself was found dead, a recording of Mozart's twenty-third piano concerto lay on his turntable.

  Kipling was an anti-Semite.

  At thirty-five, Antonio Machado married a fifteen-year-old. Who died when Machado was thirty-eight.

  Or possibly now someone he will never see closely at all, not coming toward him but moving in his same direction? And always a fair distance ahead?

  Continuing on to become a kind of actualized vanishing point when Protagonist himself halts?

  Stefan Zweig committed suicide.

  Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.

  John Masefield was fourteen when he first went to sea.

  David Alfaro Siqueiros once attempted to assassinate Trotsky.

  Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is right-wise king born of all England.

  Verse deemed unsuitable to the state.

  Is Noah's drunkenness the earliest anywhere taken note of?

  Avalokiteshvara.

  Vanishing point.

  She?

  Marcel Proust collected signatures for petitions in protest against the conviction of Dreyfus.

  Hugh Casey shot himself.

  Saint John of Capistrano was an anti-Semite.

  Fly's Photograph Gallery.

  Arthur Symons on Mallarme:

  He made neither intrusion upon nor concession to those who, after all, were not obliged to read him.

  Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe.

  Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein.

  Three quarks for Muster Mark!

  Even in the solemn moments of the mass, when prayer should be the purest. . . when I should groan for what I have done, I sigh for what I have lost.

  Ramon Mercader.

  Goethe, to Eckermann: Have all the nations of the world since Euripides produced one dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?

  Apollinaire came extremely close to being permanently paralyzed by a head wound in World War I.

  Once more before he dies Protagonist will read Moll Flanders.

  My father's a judge.

  My mother pleaded her belly.

  Sir Richard Burton, of the Kama Sutra, spoke twenty-nine languages.

  Tchaikovsky was an anti-Semite.

  Thomas Mann's definition of a writer. Someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

  Mrs. Hutchinson.

  Harry Crosby shot himself in the head. After first shooting the young married woman with whom he was having an affair.

  At sixteen, Montserrat Caballe was working in a handkerchief factory in Barcelona.

  Plautus once worked in a flour mill.

  Three years after Baudelaire's death, the photographer Nadar glimpsed Jeanne Duval distantly, on crutches, on a Paris street.

  There is no further word of her.

  Protagonist obtusely hatless in these snows too?

  Patterned after whom?

  Faulkner died following a fall from a horse.

  Like Keats's father.