Reader's Block

by David Markson

  The Aeneid is rife with allusions to Homer, but also to Homeric criticism. It was Virgil's assumption that his readers would recognize both.

  Beiderbecke. Trumbauer.

  The odd death of Emile Zola. From smoke inhalation, when a chimney in a bedroom fireplace backed up.

  Dormir nonchalamment a V ombre de ses seins.

  Hannibal committed suicide via poison.

  Murray Gell-Mann.

  The first person Dickens wanted to meet, on his first visit to America, was William Cullen Bryant.

  Civilization and Its Distant Tents.

  Cartons like an impermanent sculpture of found objects. On a stairway ending at a sealed-off door.

  He had become a dirty bourgeois.

  Lord, don't help us. But don't muck it up for us either.

  Henry James most likely died a virgin. John Ruskin indisputably did.

  Whistler was an anti-Semite.

  Casals practiced Bach's six suites for solo cello for twelve years before performing one in public.

  Oh! do not add to my miseries by your constancy.

  For Protagonist's literary past:

  Protagonist: Good Lord. Is that the same T-shirt of mine you put on when you were here six days ago?

  Jack Kerouac: Oh, well. But I did have a shower.

  Bhartrihari.

  And money answereth all things.

  Adrienne Rich's husband committed suicide.

  Elizabeth I did a translation of The Consolation of Philosophy.

  As had Chaucer.

  As had King Alfred.

  Though in the latter's instance into Anglo-Saxon.

  Tending to forget that the account of the Good Samaritan, in Luke, is an anti-Semitic parable.

  Tending to forget that Plato advocated totalitarianism.

  La Noche Triste.

  Aharon Appelfeld escaped from a Nazi labor camp at the age of eight. Eight. And spent three years hiding in the forests of Romania and the Ukraine.

  Jerzy Kosinski did nothing of the kind.

  Edith Metzger.

  Anaxagoras committed suicide by starving himself.

  In the first year of the eighty-eighth Olympiad.

  And when asked near the end how he wished to be commemorated, said schoolchildren should be given a holiday.

  In 1811 a huge Cimabue altarpiece of a Madonna and angels, which has been the Louvre's finest thirteenth-century offering ever since, was bought in Tuscany for five francs.

  0 lente, lente currite, noctis equi!

  Was the diegetic diachrony of narration truly damaged by Flaubert, as Lyotard says?

  Diegetic, dialogic, hegemonic. Privilege, as a verb. Foreground, as a verb. Valorize. Praxis. Simulacra. Metafiction. Logocentrism. Phallocentrism. Discourse. Signifier/signified. Aporia.

  Late capitalism. Gynophobia.

  Text.

  None of the above.

  Lang, Leaf, and Myers; Butcher and Lang. The King James Homer.

  The Open Society and Its Enemies.

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

  Also tending to forget that character in The Plague, Joseph Grand? Who rewrites the same opening sentence for a novel eternally, with only minimal variations?

  Justinian was an anti-Semite.

  In 1959, in Mexico City, Reader happened upon a Shakespeare and Company Ulysses for pennies in a thieves' market. Its front cover had faded and was detached, the spine and back cover were missing. Nor was it a first printing.

  Nonetheless.

  Clinamen. Tessera. Kenosis.

  Abednego.

  Coleman Dowell committed suicide in a leap from a balcony.

  As of 1994, after its restoration, seventeen of the draped figures in Michelangelo's Last Judgment remained so. Presumably this time for curatorial reasons only, however.

  Raskolnikov has come to this place. Bloom has come to this place. Rieux has come to this place.

  Long hence, perhaps, Diotima,

  I shall see you here.

  Esther Johnson. Esther Vanhomrigh.

  Vanishing point.

  Melville and Whitman were born within two months of each other and died within six. And were in close proximity in or near New York through much of their lives.

  Never meeting.

  Mycenae.

  As a master at a boy's school in London during World War I, Eliot tried to teach his pupils baseball. John Betjeman included.

  Sergei Esenin was an anti-Semite.

  Kierkegaard was probably impotent.

  Miss J. Hunter Dunn.

  Longfellow's first wife died young. The second, mother of grave Alice, laughing Allegra, and Edith with the golden hair, was burned to death when her clothing caught fire while she was melting sealing wax.

  The name Salome translates from the Hebrew as peaceful.

  Robert Desnos, who had been tortured by the Gestapo for working with the French Resistance, survived periods in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But died of typhus just as the camps were being liberated.

  Gib mir den Kopf des Jokanaan!

  James Leo Herlihy committed suicide with sleeping pills.

  The Martello tower at Sandycove is near Dalkey. Which is adjacent to Sallynoggin.

  Horse Badorties.

  A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so, Einstein said.

  Confusing one's mental picture of Marguerite Duras and Jeanne Moreau.

  Don Bildow. At the Swiss end of the Simplon Tunnel.

  Vico Road.

  La Vestale was Napoleon's favorite opera.

  There is no such thing as literal meaning.

  There is no such thing as intrinsic merit.

  Fish and guests in three days are stale, says Lyly in Euphues.

  El sueno de la razon produce monstruos.

  Walter Slezak committed suicide.

  One of Shelley's grandfathers was born in New Jersey.

  Tall but pot-bellied, Chaucer describes himself as.

  Knut Hamsun was an anti-Semite.

  And was so blatantly sympathetic with the Germans in both world wars that thousands of Norwegians mailed him back copies of his novels in contempt.

  De Kooning: Some guy came into my studio for fifteen minutes and wrote something it took six hours to read.

  Belmonte. Joselito. Manolete. Dominguin.

  Ilse Koch.

  Otto Weininger shot himself.

  For Protagonist's less distant literary past:

  Donald Barthelme: Tell me what you've been up to.

  Protagonist: You'll be sorry you asked. Do you want to hear about the lung cancer surgery I just had, or the prostate cancer surgery I'm going to have?

  Barthelme: Talk. And then I'll tell you about my throat cancer.

  Gondal. Angria.

  Andrea del Sarto was sometimes hired to paint the equivalent of wanted posters on the walls of Florentine buildings.

  As were Andrea del Castagno and Botticelli.

  Dust hath closed Helen's eye.

  Virgil died in 19 B.C. Augustine is but one of many who appear to have sincerely believed that his fourth eclogue, which talks of the birth of a divine child, prophesied the coming of Christ.

  Medieval legend would add that Saint Paul wept at his tomb for not having had an opportunity to convert him.

  Caligula and his sister.

  The line Les lauriers sont coupes is from a verse by Theodore de Banville.

  Who filched it from an old nursery rhyme.

  John Marston complained mockingly about the excessive scholarly allusions in the work of his Elizabethan contemporaries. Though proving readily able to refer to the most common current sources himself while doing so, including Vencenzo Cartari, Natale Conti, and Jean Tixier de Ravisi.

  Has Reader sometimes felt he has spent his entire life as if preparing for doctoral orals?

  In 1985, in 653 at bats, Wade Boggs swung and missed at a first pitch exactly once.


  One of Gottfried Benn's wives committed suicide.

  So did one of his mistresses.

  Schopenhauer once pushed an elderly seamstress down a flight of stairs because she had been talking loudly outside the door to his flat.

  And was forced to pay her an annuity for the twenty years until her death.

  Unlike the case with the Metaphysics, the title of the Nicomachean Ethics came from either its editor's name, or its dedicatee's. One or both having been Aristotle's son. Nicomachus.

  Brundisium.

  Dear Sir,—I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are. You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell you of & why I am shut up I don't know I have nothing to say so I conclude

  Yours respectfully

  John Clare

  Cato the Younger committed suicide with a dagger. He spent the night before contemplating Socrates' death in the Phaedo.

  Protagonist has had surgery for cancer twice?

  Protagonist has prostate cancer still, but it is for the moment under control?

  Nothing odd will do long; Tristram Shandy did not last.

  Said Johnson.

  Who also determined that time was too precious to be wasted on such as Fielding.

  All of Heinrich Heine was banned by the Nazis. When something like Die Lorelei refused to go quietly, it miraculously became the work of Author Unknown.

  Joyce died of a perforated ulcer.

  Herrenvolk.

  Naphtali Herz Imber.

  The foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses. Thus Mark Twain on Titian's Venus of Urbino.

  Whose fingertips rest almost unwittingly at her groin.

  For whatever aesthete's reasons, Rilke could not be troubled to attend his own daughter's wedding.

  As a boy, Dmitri Shostakovich played the piano in theaters showing silent movies.

  As did Protagonist's mother, at approximately the same date in time.

  In Kingston, New York.

  Catherine Tekakwitha.

  Richard Tucker was once a cantor in Brooklyn.

  The greatest music critic who ever lived, Auden called Shaw.

  Galgenlieder.

  Jean Genet was an anti-Semite.

  Elpenor. Whom Odysseus forgot to bury.

  Palinurus. Whom Aeneas remembered to.

  Drusilla.

  Would Reader look at the skull beside his desk differently if he decided it was a woman's?

  Protagonist has it. On a windowsill. On the windowsill of the window that looks out onto the graves.

  Et in Arcadia ego.

  King Saul committed suicide.

  Every Man desires to live long; but no Man would be old. Said Swift.

  Isaac Newton was idiosyncratic enough to say no when Voltaire wanted to meet him. And again with Benjamin Franklin.

  How Beautiful with Shoes.

  Akhmatova, in Leningrad, her son in prison, waiting in line daily, in the hope of at least being allowed to pass in a parcel. Can you put this into words? And I said: I can.

  John Berryman:

  Rilke was a jerk.

  Margo Adams.

  Concerning whom I may truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best.

  I guess maybe there are two kinds of writers, writers who write stories and writers who write writing.

  Said Raymond Chandler.

  Garbo with no eyebrows?

  Cal Lowell.

  One fine morning in May a slim young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.

  John Davidson drowned himself.

  Simeon Solomon died in a workhouse.

  Did ever a woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?

  Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

  Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

  Protagonist has also had cataract surgery?

  Gretcben am Spinnrade.

  Picasso had two children in his late sixties.

  It is patently more sensible, in this workaday world, to be a James Jones than a James Joyce. Said Protagonist's father.

  Mussorgsky was an anti-Semite.

  The Sallynoggin Archive.

  Norma Jean Baker committed suicide.

  The cemetery framed beyond the window in January light. The skull, lower left foreground, a redundant nearer memento mori.

  The eschatology of the still white stones in snow.

  Is there a woman again after all?

  Price of Admission Your Mind. Not for Everybody.

  Alborak.

  A man should never face the sun when urinating, Hesiod says.

  Not to offend the sun god Helios, presumably being why.

  Madame de La Fayette. Madame de Sévigné. Madame de Staël.

  The Rev. G. A. Studdert Kennedy.

  For forty-some years, Valéry awoke at 5 a.m. to make notes on what he thought of as the dawning of consciousness.

  A big book, a big evil.

  Said Callimachus.

  During a literary dispute about epic poetry with Apollonius of Rhodes.

  Who had once been his pupil.

  At Alexandria.

  The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint your intellect imposes on your imagination. Said Schiller to a friend who had difficulty writing.

  Sappho with white hair?

  Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.

  Said Barnett Newman.

  What moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?

  Dora Carrington committed suicide with a borrowed revolver.

  Leonora Carrington was a better painter.

  Ma in Ispagna son già milk e tre!

  Capodistria.

  The Laura whom Petrarch saw in a church at Avignon at twenty-three, and spent the rest of his life writing poems about, may very likely have never given him a thought.

  Not only having been married, but already in progress toward eleven children.

  Though Dante claims to have seen Beatrice no more than twice himself. While immortalizing her even more extraordinarily.

  Boadicea committed suicide with poison.

  Athenaeus. Seven volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

  Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of the Tibetan Book of the Dead?

  Of the cataloguing of the Cairo Geniza?

  Reader and this notion of his.

  Or does the absence of narrative progression plus that cross-circuited schematism possibly render it even a poem of sorts?

  Not to add avec exactly 333 interspersed unattributed quotations awaiting annotation?

  For a time, Beaumont and Fletcher actually lived together. Evidently so intimate that they indiscriminately wore each other's clothing.

  And with but one wench in the house between them, in John Aubrey's phrase.

  Fletcher alone being a cousin of Phineas and Giles, however.

  A recording of Bella figlia deWamore, with Beniamino Gigli, Amelita Galli-Curci, Louise Homer, and Giuseppe de Luca. Dated December 1927.

  Ergo, by one chance in thirty-one, possibly recorded on the day Protagonist was born.

  Hugo de Sade. S

  imon de' Bardi.

  Camus called Faulkner the greatest modern novelist.

  But then named Pylon and Sanctuary as the best of his books.

  Living a full life span, parents who will still have died too soon to learn what their children will truly become.

  The identities of their ultimate defeats.

  Han Van Meegeren was found out only when he was accused of having sold Dutch masterpieces to Hermann Goering in World War II. To prove they had been rather less than that, he diligently forged one additional Vermeer.