The Last Novel

by David Markson

  William Faulkner. Seated on a park bench near City Hall in today’s Oxford, Mississippi — in bronze.

  Thomas Eakins was once accused of incest with a sister.

  And a niece.

  Henry Roth acknowledged the same with a sister — and for over a period of years.

  Contemplating several of Turner’s early watercolors, a prospective buyer implies that he has recently seen better.

  Which has to mean you’ve been looking at Tom Girtin, Turner tells him.

  Wondering if there can be any other ranking twentieth-century American poet whose body of work contains even half the percentage of pure drivel as Wallace Stevens’.

  Novelist’s calendar, which he leafs through idly to verify something he already suspected — that he has been out to dinner a grand total of three times in the entire past year, and then only when taken by some book person with an expense account.

  The unceasing preoccupation with marriageableness and/or the economics of same in Jane Austen.

  Suicide is more respectable, Emerson said.

  Rarely remembering that the first translation from ancient Greek any of us learn to quote is of Pythagoras.

  Kierkegaard’s mother had originally been the family maid, whom his father married after the death of an earlier wife. There is not one word about her in anything Kierkegaard ever wrote, his journals included.

  Henry Fielding’s wife’s maid — whom he likewise married after the wife’s death.

  Rembrandt’s — who became his mistress.

  Handel spent almost fifty years in London — and to the end spoke only broken English.

  The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the et cetera.

  Hideous, Hume condemned much of Spinoza as.

  Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

  Said Voltaire — describing opera.

  Unlike most Italians, Joe DiMaggio never reeks of garlic.

  Life magazine matter-of-factly took note of in 1939.

  Not to add that he keeps his hair slick with water instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease — unquote, additionally.

  And so to Mrs. Martin and there did what je voudrais avec her, both devante and backward.

  Reads an entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary for early June, 1666.

  An earlier tenant in the same London building where Sylvia Plath would commit suicide — had been Yeats.

  Pelion and Ossa. In Odyssey XI. In Georgics I. In Horace’s Odes III.

  With small Latin and less Greek, Shakespeare found them for Hamlet where?

  The thirteen extant letters of Plato.

  Did Plato write any of the thirteen?

  Gertrude Stein once delighted Picasso by reporting that a collector had been dumbfounded, years afterward, to hear that Picasso had given her her portrait as a gift, rather than asking payment.

  Not understanding that that early in Picasso’s career, the difference had been next to negligible.

  I don’t think anybody should write his autobiography until after he’s dead.

  Said Samuel Goldwyn.

  One author pilfers the best of another.

  And calls it tradition.

  Says a fragment of Bacchylides, ca. 450 BC.

  Brooklyn, Leonard Bernstein is buried in.

  February 22, 1913, Saussure died on.

  Too lazy to copy down passages he thought he might later wish to quote, De Quincey often simply ripped them out of the book at hand.

  Even when the book was someone else’s.

  A photo of Lillie Langtry, as Rosalind in As You Like It, taken in 1882.

  How can Novelist have fallen in love with someone dead since 1929?

  Henry James, addressing Joseph Conrad: Mon cher confrère.

  Conrad, addressing James: Mon cher maître.

  Both, repeatedly, when in conversation, said Ford Madox Ford.

  More than fifty relatives of Bach, whose names remain on record, were musicians.

  Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

  Guy Davenport’s account of a lunch with Thomas Merton — at which Merton devoured six martinis.

  Spinach, fruit, water.

  Having been Mahler’s unvarying diet.

  Ethiopians have black sperm, believed Herodotus.

  A sort of gutless Kipling.

  Orwell called Auden.

  Ernest Poole. Margaret Wilson. Julia M. Peterkin. Margaret Ayer Barnes. T. S. Stribling.

  Being five of the first fifteen winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

  Caroline Miller. Josephine W. Johnson. Harold L. Davis.

  Being the next three.

  Ted Hughes’s father was one of only seventeen survivors from an entire regiment annihilated at Gallipoli.

  No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more.

  Said Seamus Heaney at the 1998 funeral of Hughes himself.

  I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion, I loathe the country.

  Says someone in Congreve’s The Way of the World.

  I’m going. I find the company very uncongenital.

  Says someone in a Gypsy Rose Lee mystery.

  He had abroun hayre. His complexion exceeding faire — he was so faire they called him the Lady of Christ’s College.

  Being Milton, as reported by John Aubrey.

  Paavo Nurmi died partially paralyzed.

  Paavo Nurmi.

  The French government provides the Paris Opera a subsidy of roughly $135,000,000 each year.

  The United States gives the Metropolitan Opera less than $1,000,000.

  At eighteen, John Stuart Mill spent several nights in jail for having distributed birth control pamphlets in a London slum.

  Delmore Schwartz, in his disturbed final years, hearing voices — and insisting that they were directed at him from the spire of the Empire State Building.

  The Book of Margery Kempe, evidently the first autobiography in English by a woman.

  Surely the first to have been dictated — by an illiterate author.

  Martin Heidegger’s affair with Hannah Arendt — conducted in the main at a squalid hotel next to the Marburg railroad station.

  Sainte-Beuve’s affair with Victor Hugo’s wife.

  Teilhard de Chardin was forbidden by the Jesuits to publish any of his philosophical writings while he lived.

  November 30, 1935, Fernando Pessoa died on.

  Leuprolide acetate. Metoprolol. Hydrochlorothiazide. Atorva-statin. Aspirin. Salmeterol xinafoate. Flunisolide. Omeprazole.

  Loperamide hydrochloride. Simethicone. Calcium carbonate.

  Or is Novelist forgetting one or two.

  It is really most unfortunate that she rules out copulation.

  Said Lytton Strachey of Virginia Woolf ’s major novels.

  Jeanne Eagels. As the original Sadie Thompson.

  Irene Papas, as Antigone.

  Irene Papas, as Helen.

  Stainless maiden amid the stain of blood.

  Lucretius calls Iphigenia.

  You never hear of a novel-wright or a picture-wright or a poem-wright — why a playwright?

  Asked W. S. Gilbert.

  When the stove is clean enough I shall turn on the gas.

  Wrote Anna Wickham — twelve years before she hanged herself instead.

  Where the synecdoche of tessera made a totality, however illusive, the metonymy of kenosis breaks this up into discontinuous fragments.

  Somewhere declareth Harold Bloom.

  It may be essential to Harold Bloom that his audience not know quite what he is talking about.

  Commenteth Alfred Kazin — pointing out other immortal phrasings altogether.

  How many of you are there in the quartet?

  The affecting ancient legend that when Pindar was a youngster, bees once coated his lips with honey while he slept.

  Alprazolam.

  Robert Pershing Doerr.

  Pausing to remember that no fewer than eight
characters in Hamlet — eight — die violently.

  The Theatre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris.

  Whose name the Nazis changed during the occupation because of her having been a Jew.

  174517 —

  Which Primo Levi could read tattooed on his left forearm from Auschwitz onward.

  Light from the lighthouse at Alexandria, one of antiquity’s Seven Wonders, was visible from as far as twenty miles at sea.

  Helmut Newton died in a car crash. At eighty-three.

  Trying to conceive of having attended Georgia State College for Women in the mid-1940s.

  And wondering who in heaven’s name there was for Flannery O’Connor to have a conversation with.

  Paul Valéry’s wife was a niece of Berthe Morisot — and had in fact posed for Morisot any number of times.

  Alexander Blok’s wife was the daughter of the chemist Mendeleyev.

  Morningless sleep.

  Epicurus called death.

  Leonardo. Michelangelo. Botticelli. Raphael. Watteau. Claude. Van Dyck. Guido Reni. Pontormo. Poussin. Donatello. Reynolds.

  Being but a handful among artists who never married.

  An unpurchasable mind.

  Shelley credited himself with.

  Baudelaire, twice — in print — called upon Poe as a kind of patron saint to intercede for him during a prayer.

  Malcolm Lowry, seemingly serious himself, told a friend he had once prayed to Kafka:

  And he answered my prayer.

  In addition to French, Delacroix read fluently in Greek, Latin, Italian, English, and evidently German.

  Latin, French, Italian, and Flemish.

  Rubens wrote letters in.

  Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben.

  Pigalle’s sculpture of a naked eighty-plus-year-old Voltaire — for which the body was posed for by a different elderly man altogether.

  Saul Kripke had mastered advanced calculus before finishing grammar school.

  In Omaha.

  She Who Was Once the Helmet-Maker’s Beautiful Wife.

  Readers who assume that the title Samson Agonistes means something about Samson in pain.

  After the breakthrough by Marian Anderson and Mattiwilda Dobbs, the next two dominant black singers at the Metropolitan were Leontyne Price and Martina Arroyo. Arroyo was frequently mistaken for Price. I’m the other one, love, she told the Met doorkeeper who got it wrong one morning.

  Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.

  Fanny Burney’s account of her surgery for breast cancer at fifty-nine, in 1811.

  Before anesthesia.

  Dwight Eisenhower was once asked by an assistant if he would like to meet Robert Frost, who happened to be visiting someone else at the White House.

  Eisenhower could not think of a reason why he should bother.

  A hetaera named Cyrene, remembered for 2,400 years — because Aristophanes indicates that she could perform in a dozen different positions.

  Theoris and Archippe, two others remembered for slightly longer.

  Because Sophocles had affairs with each.

  Apelles’ long-lost Birth of Venus, painted 1,800 years before Botticelli’s — and said to have been a likeness of Phryne, the most beautiful of them all.

  And all of whom must surely have been included in an equally irretrievable work by Suetonius —

  His lost book entitled On Famous Courtesans.

  Shakespeare’s younger sister.

  The Westminster Review called Emily Brontë.

  Cervantes was a relative of his.

  Kipling said of Mark Twain.

  I think what attracted me was less art itself than the artist’s life, the freedom to live as one pleased.

  Said Bonnard, re having become a painter.

  Nulla dies sine linea.

  Not a day without a line, Pliny says Apelles said.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was wounded three times in the Civil War.

  John Simon’s verdict that there were two things he was able to say about the poems of Robert Creeley:

  They are short; they are not short enough.

  It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.

  March 13, 1979, Madeleine Grey died on.

  Contemporary art criticism, second decade, fourteenth century. From the Purgatorio:

  In painting Cimabue was thought to hold the field, but now Giotto has the cry, so that the other’s fame grows dim.

  Our sodomite-saint.

  Malcolm Muggeridge called T. E. Lawrence.

  Jack Daniel’s Tennessee sour mash whiskey.

  Being the best thing he knew about America, Jacques Lacan said.

  A London street called Ropemaker’s Lane, Daniel Defoe died in.

  Gibbon, on Samuel Johnson:

  Bigoted.

  Boswell, on Gibbon:

  Ugly, affected, disgusting.

  It’s a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

  Quoth Grace Paley.

  Bertrand Russell was born ten years before James Joyce, and died on Joyce’s birthday — twenty-nine years after him.

  Jane Avril died in an old people’s home. Forty-one years after the death of Toulouse-Lautrec.

  Nietzsche, who proclaimed that God was dead — but whose own coffin was adorned with a silvered cross.

  Damn, I’m almost sorry you called. Can you even begin to guess how many friends of mine that makes, just in the past year or so?

  I assume you’re aware of something else too, chum? At our age, we don’t replace them.

  The failure of the 1853 premiere of Verdi’s La Traviatta — essentially because the soprano was viewed as too plump for a heroine dying of tuberculosis.

  Troppo prosperosa, being the Italian.

  I think A Bend in the River is much, much better than Conrad.

  Pronounced the humility-drenched author of A Bend in the River.

  The acute suggestiveness in Pascal’s apology for having written a particularly long letter.

  Because he hadn’t had the time to write a short one.

  Peoples bore me,

  literature bores me, especially great literature.

  Says Henry in The Dream Songs.

  The Homer of painting, Reynolds called Michelangelo.

  The Homer of painting, Delacroix called Rubens.

  Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.

  Said Maynard Keynes, at a 1929 return of Wittgenstein to Cambridge after fifteen years away.

  An eclectic realist of disputed merit.

  The actual catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum once called Manet.

  Miles Davis’s speedometer had already reached 105 miles per hour, on New York’s West Side Highway, when one of the people with him asked if he should be driving so fast.

  I’m in here too, Davis’s concept of reassurance was.

  Corbière was dead at thirty.

  Giorgione, at thirty-three or thirty-four.

  Books weaken the memory.

  Says Plato in the Phaedrus.

  Machines cannot think.

  Charles Ives gave away the cash that came with his Pulitzer Prize.

  Badges of mediocrity, dismissing such awards as.

  Created only for imbeciles, rogues, and rascals, Cézanne had had it.

  Conversely Edvard Grieg, who displayed his medals unabashedly — particularly since they sped him through customs with all complications waived, he discovered.

  The meaningless oddity that one of Washington’s pet hounds at Mount Vernon — was named Truman.

  The report that Turner, told he was dying, asked his doctor to leave the room for a glass of sherry and then to judge things again.

  Which the doctor allegedly did — but with no change of diagnosis.

  Amiri Baraka’s slapdash, banal, repetitious, self-contradictory, mendacious poem, Somebody Blew Up America.

  Novelist is forgetting odious.

  He who writes for fools
will always find a large audience.

  Said Schopenhauer.

  Tertian malaria, Velazquez died of.

  The words honest — or honesty — occur fifty-two times in Othello.

  Diodorus Siculus. Twelve volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

  Dio Cassius. Nine volumes.

  Freud’s first publication in English — via the Hogarth Press.

  Which is to say, by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

  There’s rosemary for you and rue for you.

  Echoed John Webster — at most six years after Ophelia’s earlier usage.

  Ted Williams, bedded after a stroke, seen reaching out to lightly bat away a child’s balloon — and missing.

  Ted Williams.

  Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

  Said Cesare Pavese.

  Les bourgeois, ce sont les autres.

  Said Jules Renard.

  Baudelaire wore rouge.

  Because of global warming, the last snows will be gone from Kilimanjaro very possibly within Novelist’s own remaining lifetime.

  January 5, 1942, Tina Modotti died on.

  Cardinal Newman, being directed by Everett Millais to a tall chair atop a platform where he was to sit for his portrait:

  Your Eminence, on that eminence, if you please.

  Abject bottom-licking narcissism —

  Martha Gellhorn found in Hemingway.

  Bogus, Zelda Fitzgerald’s word for him was.

  Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s addiction to chloral hydrate. And whiskey.

  There will always be another poet.

  Said Stevie Smith.

  You never paint the Parthenon; you never paint a Louis XV armchair. You make pictures out of some little house in the Midi, a packet of tobacco, or an old chair.

  Said Picasso.

  Until the election of Marguerite Yourcenar, in 1981, no woman had ever been named to the French Academy.

  On the original title pages of Jane Austen, before the posthumous disclosure of her identity:

  By a Lady.

  Ray Bradbury’s father was a telephone lineman.

  His third wife, Lady Jean Campbell, in regard to life with Norman Mailer:

  All we ever did was go to dinner with his mother.

  No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

  Constable. Etty. Haydon. Landseer. Leslie.

  All of whom were pupils of Fuseli.

  Pavel Tchelitchew. Wyndham Lewis. Roger Fry.

  All of whom painted portraits of Edith Sitwell.