The Last Novel

by David Markson

  Says Miles Coverdale’s earlier version.

  A designated area for booksellers existed in the central market in Athens as far back as in the fifth century BC.

  The report from that same era to the effect that Aeschylus gave up writing after members of an audience were killed when a tier of wooden benches collapsed during a performance of his work.

  At least one of Modigliani’s sculptures was carved from a discarded construction-site stone — because he could not afford to pay money for something better.

  Jean-Baptiste Lully’s confessor once refused to grant him absolution unless Lully agreed to destroy the score of a recent opera, which the confessor believed blasphemous. Lully let the work be burned and was properly shrived.

  With an extra copy safely set aside.

  Neither Graham Greene nor Evelyn Waugh ever learned to drive a car.

  I always said God was against art and I still believe it.

  Said Edward Elgar — while impatiently awaiting acclaim.

  All artists are bores.

  Unquote. Clement Greenberg.

  By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the saints, we anathematize, execrate, curse, and cast out Baruch Spinoza, the whole of the sacred community assenting —

  This trivial and vulgar way of union; it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.

  Declaimed Sir Thomas Browne — about sex.

  Organized Christian denominations and their individual congregations:

  Chain stores and their retail outlets, Thorstein Veblen called them.

  Duke Ellington and Miles Davis are buried in the same Bronx cemetery.

  Chopin was buried in Père Lachaise in Paris — but with Polish earth later sprinkled on the grave.

  — There shall be no man speak to him, no man write to him, no man show him any kindness, no man stay under the same roof with him, no man come nigh him.

  The greatest novel ever written.

  Kingsley called Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

  November 6 or 7, 1944, Hannah Senesch was executed on.

  As his once extraordinary fame in France’s literary world faded, Chateaubriand also became extremely hard of hearing.

  He only thinks he is deaf because he no longer hears himself talked about, Talleyrand said.

  Virgil was five years older than Horace.

  Wondering when and where the last casual streetcorner conversation in Latin might have taken place.

  Norma loquendi.

  The rumor that Frieda Lawrence’s lover after Lawrence’s death, whom she asked to transport Lawrence’s ashes from France to New Mexico, indifferently dumped them — and substituted no one knows what before the Taos reburial.

  Mouse-poor, Robert Graves describes John Clare as having been.

  Drunk as a mouse.

  Chaucer somewhere writes.

  A sub-human species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our time.

  General George S. Patton compassionately described Jewish concentration-camp survivors as.

  Picasso. Cézanne. Matisse. Braque. Bonnard. Renoir.

  All of whom painted portraits of Ambroise Vollard.

  Cartier-Bresson. Brassaï. Man Ray. Lee Miller. Robert Doisneau. Robert Capa. David Douglas Duncan. Cecil Beaton.

  All of whom photographed Picasso.

  George Washington’s will called for the freeing of his slaves.

  As had Aristotle’s for the freeing of most of his — 2,100 years earlier.

  More’s Utopia, in which women are granted full and equal rights to education with men — dated 1516.

  Pulmonary fibrosis, Marlon Brando died of.

  Don’t keep talking to me about nature, said Corot. All I see out there are Corots.

  A 1940 letter from Béla Bartók, new in New York, about attempting to go by subway from Forest Hills, in Queens, to lower Manhattan —

  And spending three mystified hours underground before sneaking shamefacedly home — his words — without ever achieving his destination.

  Turner’s eternal stovepipe hat.

  Eliot’s bowler.

  Saul Bellow’s fedora.

  A precious, priestly, hothouse darling.

  Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch dismissed Hopkins as.

  Revolting, the London Times called Millais’ Christ in the House of His Parents.

  The occasion, soon after Vladimir Horowitz became Toscanini’s son-in-law, on which Toscanini leaned from the podium and patted him on the head at the end of a performance.

  Green eyes, the self-portraits indicate van Gogh had.

  It has been possible for a long time to conceive of a poet who has never written a poem.

  Leslie Fiedler once said.

  Debussy never learned which side won World War I.

  Old enough to have started coming upon likenesses on postage stamps of other writers he had known personally or had at least met in passing.

  Anthony Trollope was once told by an acquaintance that one of his recurring serialized characters had become boring.

  Trollope killed her off in the next installment.

  The misfortunate, otherwise unknown first-century BC Roman Egnatius — remembered because of a poem in which Catullus accuses him of cleaning his teeth with urine.

  The only excuse for the suffering that God allows in the world — is that he does not exist.

  Stendhal said.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s addiction to morphine.

  And/or ether.

  Is there one major Dostoievsky novel in which no one commits suicide?

  Dostoievsky gave me more than any thinker, more even than Gauss.

  Einstein said.

  Former Naval Person —

  Winston Churchill’s code name having been in World War II.

  Colonel Berger —

  Malraux’s, in the Resistance.

  Kipling, who was forty-two, remains the youngest author to win the Nobel Prize.

  Camus was forty-four.

  July 17, 1967, John Coltrane died on.

  Aspen, Colorado, Mina Loy died in.

  Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma, kept a twenty-year diary that was evidently devoted almost entirely to the evisceration of his character.

  Hardy burned every word of it at her death.

  A second wife, Florence, once accused him of not having spoken to anyone outside of their house in twelve days. Hardy insisted he had.

  He had said good morning to the manure-cart driver.

  O body, mass of corruptions, what have I to do with thee?

  Asked Augustine.

  The proper study of mankind is books.

  Said Aldous Huxley.

  Benoit Mandelbrot.

  Benoit de Sainte-Maure.

  Émile Zola’s certainty that after a hundred years Les Fleurs du Mal would be no more than a footnoted curiosity in literary history.

  Maugham’s — that there was nothing to be found in Mallarmé but pretense and platitudes.

  The identity of the Immortal Beloved.

  Keep hold of my arm, they must make room for us, not we for them.

  Shortly after its publication, Robert McAlmon informed Joyce that he planned to throw his copy of Ulysses out the window. Joyce told him not to:

  Socrates might be passing in the street.

  E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot.

  Said Katherine Mansfield.

  The early Shakespearean Betterton, distressed over foreign intrusions onto the late seventeenth-century London stage:

  By squeaking Italians and capering monsieurs, end quote.

  Shakespeare’s birthday, Turner was born on.

  More greatness in this man than in any other born in our times.

  Vasari saw in Donatello.

  What needs to be said is best said twice.

  Said Empedocles.

  At one point near the end of the Reign of
Terror, more than 1,300 guillotined prisoners were flung into the same single Paris mass grave — one of the 1,300 having been André Chénier.

  Continued speculation that Abraham Lincoln was homosexual.

  Bologna, Lodovico Carracci died in.

  Parma, Agostino.

  Rome, Annibale.

  Theodore Dreiser’s general preference for the word kike, rather than Jew.

  If it were up to me, I would have wiped my behind with his last decree.

  Said Mozart — after a demand by the Archbishop of Salzburg for more brevity in his church compositions.

  Fish feel pain.

  A seminonfictional semifiction.

  And with its interspersed unattributed quotations at roughest count adding up to a hundred or more.

  Good lord, Willie, you are drunk. Either that or you’re writing for a very small audience.

  Is Sir Walter Raleigh and his cloak the oldest tale from English history that children still remember?

  Or King Alfred and the cakes?

  ’Tis such a task as scarce leaves a man time to be a good neighbour, an useful friend, nay, to plant a tree, much less to save his soul.

  Said Pope, re writing well.

  Michelangelo’s Pietà —

  Is the Virgin many years too young?

  Dante will always remain popular because nobody ever reads him.

  Said Voltaire.

  Approximately seventy-five years before Blake learned Italian to do so — at sixty.

  The cocktail party at Peggy Guggenheim’s Manhattan townhouse during which Jackson Pollock casually urinated into the fireplace.

  At more than nine thousand published pages, does Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics have any competition as the longest unfinished book of the twentieth century?

  Is I Samuel 18:20, where it is stated that King Saul’s daughter Michal loves David, the only place in the Old Testament where a woman is reported to actually love a man?

  Even if by II Samuel 6:16 we find her learning to despise him?

  The paintings of a drunken privy cleaner.

  A Cézanne critic spoke of.

  The two younger brothers of William and Henry James — both of whom were wounded while fighting for the Union during the Civil War.

  I have never been surprised to find men wicked, but I have often been surprised to find them not ashamed.

  Said Swift.

  Even though they had dedicated poems to each other, because of the conditions of life in Russia Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetayeva managed to meet only once — little more than a year before Tsvetayeva would hang herself.

  Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.

  Stalin once actually ventured.

  No girl was ever seduced by a book.

  Postulated Jimmy Walker.

  Briseis, in the Iliad, who is not identified at all except as the captive maiden taken by Agamemnon from Achilles.

  But who over the centuries is transformed into the Cressida of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

  And whose name is in fact not a name — but means only the woman from Brisa, a town in Lesbos.

  If the Republicans would stop telling lies about the Democrats, we would stop telling the truth about them.

  Adlai Stevenson said.

  It Ain’t Necessarily So. In Danish.

  Which was piped into Danish radio by the underground whenever announcements were made of German victories in World War II.

  Baldur von Schirach, one of the chief Nazi war criminals tried at Nuremberg, on the origin of his anti-Semitism:

  From a book about the Jews by Henry Ford.

  The woman sleeping on the sofa dreams that she is transported into the forest, hearing the music of the snake charmer’s instrument. This explains why the sofa is in the picture.

  Unquote — Le Douanier.

  Looking is not as simple as it looks.

  Said Ad Reinhardt.

  Eighty sopranos. Eighty contraltos. Seventy basses. Sixty tenors.

  — Called for in Belioz’ Grande Messe des Mortes.

  Over the hill to the poorhouse I’m trudgin’ my weary way.

  He is the handsomest man in England, and he wears the most beautiful shirts.

  Said Yeats of Rupert Brooke.

  If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth, Novelist were to burn an Andy Warhol, qualms?

  Qualmless.

  Jane Ellen Harrison was proficient in fourteen languages.

  Utrillo, on the occasion of one of his several arrests for drunkenness — trying to commit suicide by smashing his head against the walls of his Montmartre jail cell.

  Housman, in the early 1920s, re what may have been the first flight taken by an author:

  The machine required repairs, having been damaged on the previous day by a passenger who butted his head through a window to be sick.

  We should look upon the female state as being as it were a deformity, though one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature.

  Determined Aristotle.

  Brendan Behan, to a nun caring for him in a Catholic hospital:

  Bless you, Sister. May all your sons be bishops.

  Starting out, George Gershwin sold his first two songs for a total of twelve dollars.

  October 24, 1725, Alessandro Scarlatti died on.

  July 23, 1757, Domenico.

  The curious theatrical superstition that insists it is unlucky to talk about Macbeth by name — the Scottish play, being how it is usually referred to instead.

  King Lear’s wife. Goneril’s mother, Regan’s, Cordelia’s.

  How often does it occur to anyone that there is not one remotest allusion to her in the text?

  Gravesend, on the Thames, Pocahontas died in.

  The last time anyone mentioned Sherwood Anderson.

  There are so many ways of earning a living, and most of them are failures.

  Wrote Gertrude Stein.

  Alice B. Toklas did the cooking.

  Moments in which Novelist does something like searching interminably at every hook and hanger in the apartment for his shirt — and only at the point of utter bewilderment realizing that he is wearing it.

  Pushkin’s beautiful seventeen-year-old wife Nathalie, whom he married at thirty-one — and whom he said was the one hundred and thirteenth woman he had been in love with.

  As a student, Anna Netrebko scrubbed floors in a St. Petersburg opera house.

  The word agnostic.

  Coined by Thomas Henry Huxley during the early debates on Darwinism.

  Norbert Wiener graduated from Tufts University at fourteen.

  And owned a Ph.D. from Harvard four years later.

  Wonderful news —

  Said meringue-brained Bobby Fischer at the destruction of the World Trade Center.

  Did Toulouse-Lautrec die from a sequence of strokes — or from syphilitic paralysis?

  1922. Ulysses.

  1922. The Waste Land.

  1922. Reader’s Digest.

  The first English novel for adults, Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch.

  There are 773,692 words in the King James Bible.

  Or 773,746.

  The wastepaper basket is the author’s best friend.

  Noted Isaac Bashevis Singer.

  Wondering by what date the last survivor of the Holocaust will have died.

  You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

  Said Billie Holiday.

  I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal.

  Conversely offered Zora Neale Hurston.

  Pietro Aretino died in the midst of a hysterical fit of laughter that apparently turned into an apoplectic stroke.

  As had the Athenian comic playwright Philemon — at ninety-nine.

  Or
one hundred and one.

  Lord Byron by the kilo, Dumas père described George Sand’s early romantic novels as.

  Renaissance paintings on which Bernard Berenson falsified the attributions — when handed money under the table by the dealer Duveen.

  Jude the Obscene, someone called it.

  As an apprentice, Claude Lorrain worked with the landscape painter Agostino Tassi — who a few years earlier had earned such small art-world immortality as he possesses by raping Artemisia Gentileschi.

  Artemisia. Who is granted only one sentence in Novelist’s two-volume 1962 Everyman’s Dictionary of Pictorial Art — at the end of the entry on her father.

  All female artists are sluts.

  Quoth Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.

  I leave before being left. I decide.

  Said Brigitte Bardot.

  Winslow Homer spent his last twenty-seven years on the isolated Maine peninsula of Prout’s Neck.

  — My nearest neighbor is half a mile away. I am four miles from the PO and under a snowbank most of the time. Night before last it was twelve below zero.

  January 13, 1864, Stephen Foster died on.

  Little Friend, Little Friend, I got two engines on fire. Can you see me, Little Friend?

  I’m crossing right over you. Let’s go home.

  Guido Reni’s abnormally exaggerated terror of witchcraft.

  To the extent that the mere sight of an old woman at a market could send him rushing away.

  Losing her sight in later life, Constance Garnett arranged to have Russian books read aloud — and then dictated her translations.

  A quack, Vladimir Nabokov called Thomas Mann.

  A complete mediocrity — D. H. Lawrence.

  That total fake — Ezra Pound.

  Despicable, loathsome, sick, third-rate — Dostoievsky.

  Time is the only critic without ambition.

  John Steinbeck said.

  The severest test of the imagination — is to name a cat.

  Said Samuel Butler.

  Schopenhauer’s poodle.

  Called Atma.

  Picasso’s play, Desire Caught by the Tail — which could be performed for the first time only privately, because of the Nazi occupation of Paris.

  But avec Camus, Sartre, Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau, Dora Maar, Pierre Reverdy, Simone de Beauvoir.

  The short story by one Heinz von Lichberg, published in Berlin six years before Nabokov would live there for a decade and a half — about an older man’s obsession with a young girl.

  — And entitled Lolita.