The Last Novel

by David Markson

Nothing but obscenities and filth.

  Being all Conrad could find in D. H. Lawrence.

  Disgust and horror, recorded Abigail Adams after a blackface performance of Othello:

  My whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona.

  The revolver with which van Gogh shot himself had been borrowed. Van Gogh having claimed he wished to fire at crows that were annoying him as he painted.

  The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

  Said Arthur Honegger.

  Remembering that before writing Ben Hur, Lew Wallace had been a Union general during the Civil War.

  Remembering that Abner Doubleday had been the same.

  The endless commentary, and analysis, and even retelling, in Clarissa. Anyone reading it just for the story would hang himself, Johnson said.

  Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?

  James Thurber said Harold Ross had to ask.

  Roughly two-thirds of the paintings described in the corrected second edition of Vasari’s Lives — finished in 1567 — would appear to no longer exist.

  Hamlet. A boring play full of quotations.

  Swinburne’s delirium-tremendous imagination, Hopkins called it.

  Grant Wood’s sister, Nan, and a dentist named McKeeby. Who posed for American Gothic.

  In Cedar Rapids.

  July 4, 1934, Hayyim Bialik died on.

  The letter announcing the first acceptance of a poem by Francis Thompson never reached him.

  Thompson being so indigent at the time that he literally had no address.

  Poe, in his late thirties a half-century earlier — Unable even to afford postage to put his manuscripts in the mail.

  For poor people, sick or lame, or travelers.

  Advertised the Savoy, a charitable residence in sixteenth-century London — which also saw fit to take in struggling authors.

  Thinking of them for so long as essentially literary characters that one has to force oneself to recall that Dante actually knew the Paolo of Paolo and Francesca.

  Goya died at eighty-three.

  Having had to read lips for the last thirty-six years of his life.

  Borges at eighty-six.

  Having had to be read aloud to for almost as long.

  Ovid’s poem about his sweetheart Corinna’s near-fatal abortion — dated ca. 23 BC.

  The child was mine — or so I at least

  do think.

  Baudelaire’s addiction to laudanum.

  Coleridge’s. De Quincey’s.

  Poe’s.

  The Nike of Samothrace, in the Louvre, which was excavated in 1863 — in more than one hundred fragments.

  Newspapers expressed such indignation over the ostensible immorality in Richard Strauss’s Salome at its 1907 American premiere that the opera was withdrawn after a single performance and not produced again at the Metropolitan until 1934.

  Diseased and polluted. Indescribably, yes, inconceivably, gross and abominable. Unspeakable.

  Read a small portion of what the New York Times had to contribute.

  Aristide Maillol’s practice of repeatedly urinating on his bronze sculptures.

  To add patina.

  If you value my work, please, do not knock.

  Requested a notice on Hermann Hesse’s door in Ticino.

  Gérard de Nerval, in some of the milder moments of his madness — known to toss such money as he possessed into the air for anyone’s taking in restaurants and coffeehouses.

  Anne Sexton’s periods in mental institutions.

  Only native-born citizens in ancient Athens were allowed to own property.

  Meaning that no less a personage than Aristotle, from Stagira, could not.

  The nunnery on Montmartre, mentioned a few years earlier by François Villon, where in 1503 it was discovered that the abbess and several nuns had borne children — and still others were pregnant.

  A fiend of a book. The action is laid in Hell — only it seems places and people have English names there.

  Said Dante Gabriel Rossetti of Wuthering Heights.

  Olive Fremstad. Mary Garden. Ljuba Welitsch. Karita Matilla.

  Wagner played the piano badly.

  Berlioz not at all.

  For safety’s sake during the bombings of World War II, the Elgin Marbles were removed from the British Museum and stored deep in the London subway system.

  While the French Resistance during those same years was using the Lascaux cave as a place in which to cache weapons.

  Tchaikovsky was found weeping after he had written the death of Lisa in The Queen of Spades.

  Georges Bernanos was married to a direct descendant of a brother of Joan of Arc.

  A simple creature unlettyrde.

  Julian of Norwich called herself.

  The most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.

  Echoed Jane Austen — four hundred years afterward.

  Pastor Martin Niemöller — who spent seven years at Sachsenhausen and Dachau.

  After having been a German U-boat commander in World War I.

  April 13, 1945, Ernst Cassirer died on.

  Ivan Goncharov worked in the Russian Civil Service for his entire adult life.

  Mussorgsky, the same.

  Then again, quoting himself or not, Novelist naturally does receive some few phone calls after all.

  All too often in these years with news of someone’s death, however.

  Leonardo’s peculiar habit of surreptitiously following interesting-looking strangers on the street.

  To be able to sketch them from memory later, the contemporary assumption was.

  Christianity must be divine, since it has lasted seventeen hundred years despite the fact of being so full of villainy and absurdity.

  Voltaire said.

  The first priest was the first rogue who crossed paths with the first fool.

  Voltaire also said.

  Slop, Pound was calling Yeats’s recent verse in the mid-1930s — after having been best man at Yeats’s wedding two decades earlier.

  The influence of Donne upon the literature of England was singularly wide and deep — although almost wholly malign.

  Said Edmund Gosse.

  There is no indication whatsoever of anything even remotely resembling a State of Israel on the maps in most contemporary Arab schoolbooks.

  Sixty-seven, Cézanne died at.

  Some few days after having been caught for hours in a sudden downpour where he had been at work on a landscape.

  A sort of God of painting.

  Matisse was to call him.

  One can now hear famous pieces of music as easily as one can buy a glass of beer.

  Proclaimed Debussy in delight at the advent of the phonograph.

  They who drink beer will think beer.

  Said Washington Irving.

  Cracked, Edith Sitwell called Blake.

  Flaubert’s outrage at the notion of an illustrated edition of Bovary.

  Jane, Jane,

  Tall as a crane,

  The morning light creaks down again.

  Still the most avant-garde book ever written.

  Anthony Burgess said of Tristram Shandy.

  A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

  Johnson said.

  Mahler died in 1911. Alma not until 1964.

  Beckett, on the posthumous publication of letters or other papers that their authors might not have approved of:

  When a writer dies his widow should be burned on his funeral pyre.

  To publish one line of an author which he himself did not intend for publication — especially letters — is a despicable act.

  Had said Heine earlier.

  What the dickens, lower case — which has nothing to do with the author of Great Expectations.

  I cannot tell what the dickens his name is, says someone in The Merry Wives of Windsor, on stage by 1601.r />
  It is never difficult to paint, said Dalí.

  It is either easy or impossible.

  Willie Yeats, he was frequently called.

  William Cuthbert Faulkner, his full name was.

  Christopher Marlowe evidently wrote Tamburlaine while still a student at Cambridge.

  Learn or leave. A third alternative is to be flogged.

  Declared a Latin inscription at the entrance to a church-sponsored Medieval English elementary school.

  Rousseau’s father was a watchmaker.

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu died of breast cancer.

  Too much interest in music could turn one effeminate.

  Kant said.

  Tolstoy’s certainty that Darwin was already beginning to be forgotten.

  As early as in 1903.

  Hugh Kenner’s sense of the same re Freud.

  Whom he called already nearly as dated as Trilby — in 1958.

  Goyisher kopf.

  Byron, with amiable confidence, to friends whose silence suggested that they did not particularly admire Don Juan:

  I wish you all better taste.

  The ugliness of some of his music is really masterly.

  Stated a London journal after an early Delius concert.

  Andromache. Alcestis. Helen. Medea. The Bacchae.

  Each of which Euripides ends with his chorus speaking an identical verse — to the effect that the ways of the gods are unpredictable.

  Helen, the most famous woman in Greek mythology — whose name is not a Greek name.

  The curiosity that we possess copies of ten evidently authentic letters of Dante’s — and not one of Shakespeare’s.

  August 11, 1494, Hans Memling died on.

  Dylan Thomas’s eighteenth birthday, Sylvia Plath was born on.

  I hate that dreadful hollow behind the little wood.

  Strolling on Park Avenue in New York, John Gielgud unexpectedly runs into Greta Garbo — Looking like a displaced charwoman, he later reports.

  Edgell Rickword lost an eye as an officer in France in World War I.

  Siegfried Sassoon was wounded twice.

  Thinking with someone else’s brain.

  Schopenhauer called reading.

  In the late spring of 1944, at the height of their efficiency, the forty-six ovens in the crematoriums at Auschwitz were incinerating as many as twelve thousand corpses per day.

  The word genocide had not existed until being coined by a Polish scholar in that same year.

  Italo Svevo had to pay to publish Confessions of Zeno.

  Stratford-on-Avon, Marie Corelli died in.

  I say that if you can tell a story in a picture and if a reasonable number of people like your work, it is art.

  Said Norman Rockwell.

  If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting it should be burned.

  Said Shaw.

  Ronald Reagan was a clandestine informer for the FBI when it was investigating so-called left-wing influences in Hollywood in the 1940s.

  Confucius was illegitimate.

  Michelangelo’s passing comment to Raphael, at the Vatican, that there was a young painter in Florence who would bring sweat to his brow — unquote — if he ever fulfilled himself.

  Meaning Andrea del Sarto.

  Michelangelo, who was incidentally eight years older than Raphael — and would outlive him by forty-four.

  And Andrea by thirty-three.

  The paper shit is endless.

  Quoth a 1911 letter of Einstein’s re university teaching.

  Reviewers who have accused Novelist of inventing some of his anecdotes and/or quotations — without the elemental responsibility to do the checking that would verify every one of them.

  Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.

  Said John Osborne.

  Sein oder nicht sein — ja, dass ist die Frage.

  Reads Schlegel’s translation.

  March 3, 1996, Marguerite Duras died on.

  Simonides once rejected a meager fee to compose an ode to the winner of a mule race, insisting he did not write about jackasses.

  The fee was increased. Wind-swift steeds, the jackasses miraculously became.

  Isamu Noguchi’s sets for Martha Graham.

  Eva Hesse was dead at thirty-four.

  The fact is, I did not eat every day during that period of my life.

  Said André Breton, explaining a possible origin for some of his earliest surrealist writings.

  The Pope may judge all and be judged by no man.

  Said Innocent III.

  Pericles’ mistress Aspasia, who ran a school for courtesans — and was comfortably at home in intellectual discussion with Socrates.

  No different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation.

  Said someone on radio named Rush Limbaugh about American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

  People having a good time.

  Bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

  On exhibition in a New York gallery in 2005, a portrait of Seamus Heaney — by Derek Walcott.

  Which would barely pass muster in an undergraduate painting class, according to the New York Times.

  Curiously impressed by the fact that Auden paid every one of his bills — electric, phone, whatever — on the same day that it arrived.

  Boccaccio, one of the few intellectuals in the late Middle Ages determined to recover ancient manuscripts — but all too often coming upon them in monastery storerooms never locked, with pages torn out by the fistful, with what remains refuse-strewn and indecipherable. At Monte Cassino grass even grows in the loft where windows stand open.

  Boccaccio bursts into tears.

  Cavafy was forty-one before his first book was published — containing fourteen poems.

  Remembering that in the Iliad, as rife with detailed violence as any war narrative ever written, not one captured Greek or Trojan is ever tortured.

  — And that the only Southerner hanged by the Union during the Civil War was the commanding officer at Andersonville — where inconceivably barbarous conditions had cost 12,000 incarcerated Northerners their lives.

  Teaching at New York University before its graduate art program had been fully established, during Prohibition, Erwin Panofsky sometimes met with students at a Fifty-Second Street speakeasy.

  Juvenile trash.

  Edmund Wilson dismissed the sum of J. R. R. Tolkien as.

  Alicia Markova almost never in her career weighed more than ninety-eight pounds.

  Was it Brigid Brophy who gave up on a certain Virginia Woolf novel when she discovered that Woolf believed one needed a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne?

  February 25, 1547, Vittoria Collona died on.

  The first time that Ethel Waters sang Stormy Weather, in a show at the Cotton Club, she was given no fewer than twelve encores.

  A Metropolitan Opera audience once demanded so many curtain calls after a Renata Tebaldi Desdemona that she finally came back out with her coat and hat on.

  All the fruit will fall from any tree beneath which a menstruating woman happens to sit.

  Says Pliny’s Natural History.

  While also announcing that women who sneeze after making love are almost certain to miscarry.

  The film Carmen Jones, with Dorothy Dandridge.

  In which the dubbed lyric soprano voice is that of a very young Marilyn Horne.

  The 1915 Cecil B. DeMille film of Carmen itself, with Geraldine Farrar.

  Silent.

  Stephen Crane was officially cited for bravery while a foreign correspondent during the Spanish-American War. At Guantánamo.

  Will no one free me of this turbulent priest?

  Canterbury, Joseph Conrad is buried in.

  The only exercise I get these days is walking behind the coffins of my friends who took exercise.

  Said Peter O’Toole in his late sixties.

  Karl Marx regularly re
ad Shakespeare aloud to his young children.

  ????A scheme of Robert Boyle’s, roughly 330 years ago, as recounted in Aubrey’s Brief Lives:

  At his owne costs and chardges, he gott translated and printed the New Testament into Arabique, to send into the Mahometan countreys.

  Every word of importance is already in the Koran. Anything in any other books can only be pernicious.

  Having been the Muslim rationalization for destroying all 700,000 volumes in the great library at Alexandria in 642.

  Is T. S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-three — and managed to have no sexual encounters whatever?

  You have but two topics, yourself and me, and I’m sick of both.

  Johnson once told Boswell.

  I come of a people who do not even acknowledge Jesus Christ. Why am I supposed to acknowledge Abstract Expressionism?

  Asked Jack Levine.

  The porphyry disc near the center of the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, marking the spot where Savonarola was burned at the stake in 1498.

  The statue of Giordano Bruno on the spot in the Piazza Campo de’ Fiori, in Rome, where he was burned in 1600.

  Not distinguished looking in any way — neither handsome nor ugly, neither fat nor thin, neither tall nor short.

  Said George Eliot of Dickens.

  A peculiar face — not handsome, very ugly indeed.

  Said Charlotte Brontë — of Thackeray.

  No course in Shakespeare was taught at Harvard until as late as the 1870s.

  Quentin de La Tour, harmlessly deranged in his later years — and frequently seen talking to trees.

  Another of Novelist’s economic-status epiphanies:

  Walking four or five blocks out of his way, and back, to save little more than nickels on some common household item.

  While needing to stop to rest at least two or three times en route.

  Writers are the beggars of Western society.

  Said Octavio Paz.

  There is no way of being a creative writer in America without being a loser.

  Said Nelson Algren.

  Finding oneself momentarily startled by a reference in Gorky’s diaries to Tolstoy chatting with Chekhov.

  On the telephone.

  Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night.

  Says the King James translation of Psalms 91:5.

  Thou shalt not nede to be afrayed for eny bugges by night.