The Last Novel

by David Markson

  Jean Harlow was dead at twenty-six.

  Old enough so that gradual loss of bone has left him at least two and a half inches shorter than he was when younger.

  Life is a long process of getting tired.

  Say Samuel Butler’s Notebooks.

  This is the foul fiend, Fibbertigibbet.

  The first Crusade fought its way into Jerusalem in July of 1099. Some seventy thousand surviving Muslims — the majority being women and children — were methodically slaughtered. Such Jews as remained were burned alive in a synagogue.

  All this being God’s will, the Crusaders’ motto reassured them.

  George Sand did virtually all of her writing between midnight and six AM — and then slept until three in the afternoon.

  Four years before Haydn’s death in Vienna, somehow a rumor announcing same reached Paris — where Cherubini and Kreutzer composed music for a memorial.

  What sport, if I had been able to appear and conduct the Mass myself, Haydn’s reaction was.

  Andrew Jackson was twelve years old when he enlisted to fight in the Revolutionary War.

  I will not believe that a woman can draw so well.

  Said Degas at his first view of a Mary Cassatt.

  Andreas Baader. Gudrun Ensslin. Ulrike Meinhof.

  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were Brooklyn Dodgers fans.

  Oscar Wilde’s lecture tour of the United States — which brought him to St. Joseph, Missouri, only one week after the shooting of Jesse James.

  That dirty little coward

  Who shot Mister Howard

  And laid poor Jesse in his grave.

  Irving Berlin had no schooling after the fifth grade.

  Thomas Edison had only three months of actual classroom time.

  Agatha Christie had none whatsoever.

  One would like to curse them so that thunder and lightning strike them, hell-fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them. Ignorant asses.

  Being Luther, in a contemplative mood re the papal hierarchy.

  Frida Kahlo’s amputated leg.

  Mikhail Bakhtin’s.

  The last words of Mr. Despondency were, Farewell night; welcome day! His daughter went through the river singing, but no one could understand what she said.

  Dr. Donne’s verses are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding.

  Said James I.

  Among those mailing an order to Shakespeare and Company, in Paris, for an earliest copy of Ulysses — Winston Churchill.

  July 17, 1974, Dizzy Dean died on.

  Emerald eyes, Dante says Beatrice had.

  While never telling us the color of her hair.

  A writer of something occasionally like English — and a man of something occasionally like genius.

  Swinburne called Whitman.

  A man standing up to his neck in a cesspool — and adding to its contents.

  Carlyle called Swinburne.

  Jane Welsh Carlyle died a virgin.

  The avant-garde. A kind of research and development arm of the culture industry, the critic Thomas Crowe called it.

  It is utterly impossible to persuade an editor that he is nobody.

  Said William Hazlitt.

  Galen’s astonishingly voluminous medical knowledge — much of it acquired while working as the surgeon at a gladiatorial school.

  Pontormo’s diary. Which generally concentrates more on the state of his bowels than on anything of interest in art history.

  Among the worst books ever committed to paper.

  An Archbishop of Canterbury called Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

  A child’s introduction to Nietzsche and Jung.

  The Yale Review categorized Hesse’s novels as.

  The year lost to tuberculosis early in her career by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf — probably contracted in dank World War II Vienna air-raid shelters.

  Mallarmé, never well-off, who nonetheless possessed works by Whistler, Monet, Berthe Morisot, Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Rodin — all personal gifts.

  Of contemporary literature, philosophy, and politics he appeared to know next to nothing.

  We are told by Dr. Watson about Holmes.

  Karl Marx died sitting at his desk.

  Antonin Artaud, sitting up at the foot of his bed.

  People who actually believe that Christo’s tangerine-colored bedsheets fluttering about in New York’s Central Park had something even remotely to do with art.

  Oranges and lemons,

  Say the bells of St. Clement’s.

  Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin only because a bacteria culture with which he was experimenting became contaminated — by accident.

  Chesterfield’s definition of the word illiterate, as a noun, 1748:

  A man who is ignorant of Greek and Latin.

  Matthew Arnold’s of philistine, ca. 1869:

  A person who believes his greatness is proved by being rich.

  Barbarous, Samuel Pepys called Hamlet.

  Jessica Lange was once a waitress in the Lion’s Head.

  Eve Ensler was once a waitress in the Lion’s Head.

  And yet it was impossible for me to say to men speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.

  Mark Twain’s pronouncement that the personages in a novel should be alive, except in the instance of corpses — and that the reader should be able to tell the corpses from the others.

  Unfortunately not the case in Fenimore Cooper, he determines.

  When I was boy, the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land.

  Said Sitting Bull.

  When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches.

  Said Cochise.

  Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.

  Said Geronimo.

  Noting that the first word of English that Robinson Crusoe teaches his man Friday — after the name Friday itself — is Master.

  Nathanael West once applied for a Guggenheim fellowship with recommendations from Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, and Malcolm Cowley.

  Guess.

  Novelist’s own Guggenheim applications, plural, with references equally as impressive.

  Guess — six or seven times.

  Comedy aims at representing men as worse, tragedy as better, than in actual life.

  Says Aristotle.

  Marco Polo died three years after Dante.

  Horace Greeley died insane.

  Future generations will regard Bob Dylan with the awe reserved for Blake, Whitman, Picasso and the like.

  Said an otherwise seemingly rational writer named Jonathan Lethem.

  D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow.

  The 1940s network radio broadcast of La Bohème in which Toscanini could be distinctly heard humming along with Licia Albanese and Jan Peerce as he conducted.

  Karl Popper claimed he had written the 480-plus pages of The Open Society and Its Enemies more than thirty times.

  We did not ask you white men to come here.

  Said Crazy Horse.

  A heart attack while swimming, Theodore Roethke died of.

  The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government, said Martin Luther King.

  In 1967.

  Georges Rouault was born during a bombardment in the Franco-Prussian War — in a Paris cellar.

  Bob Dylan, as poet:

  Sophomoric and obvious, said Ned Rorem.

  Bob Dylan, as composer:

  Banal and unmemorable, Rorem aussi.

  April 21, 1924, Eleonora Duse died on.

  For no reason whatsoever, Novelist has just flung his cat out one of his four-flights-up front windows.

  Saint-Exupéry wrote Le Petit Prince while living on Long Island.

  Well past fifty, Tolstoy began an intensive study of Hebrew with a Moscow rabbi — not very many years after having devoted similar concentration to mastering Greek
.

  The awareness of not having accomplished anything, and not expecting to accomplish anything in the future, is not so terrible because Tolstoy makes up for all of us.

  Concluded Chekhov.

  When will you pay me?

  Say the bells of Old Bailey.

  You go wherever you like. I’m not about to get myself killed for that wife Helen of yours.

  Says Agamemnon to Menelaus — essentially about commencing the Trojan War — in the little that remains of a lost play by Euripides.

  Act. Then call upon the gods.

  Says another Euripides fragment.

  That tampon painter.

  Joan Mitchel called Helen Frankenthaler.

  The friendship of Zola and Cézanne.

  Tracing back to when they were boys of twelve and thirteen.

  The big tragedy for the poet is poverty.

  Said Patrick Kavanagh.

  Try to get a living by the Truth — and go to the Soup Societies.

  Lamented Melville rather earlier.

  Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.

  Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.

  For a time, at the Tuileries, Napoleon kept the Mona Lisa in his bedroom.

  Only this tardily realizing — that if he had not made use of his middle name, among the better-known twentieth-century American poets would be a William Williams.

  One of the two listed witnesses at the wedding of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, was the church janitor.

  Turgenev was sentenced to a month in jail, and subsequent banishment from St. Petersburg, for the simple act of having written an obituary of Gogol, whose work was considered subversive by czarist authorities.

  I absolutely cannot do without it.

  Says Tchaikovsky’s diary, about alcohol.

  Veronese’s Finding of Moses, at the Prado.

  In which Pharaoh’s daughter and her handmaidens are shown in clothing not worn until the Renaissance.

  The last time anyone mentioned Erskine Caldwell.

  Lorca was thirty-eight when he was murdered.

  Everywhere Lorca went he found a piano.

  Rafael Alberti remembered of him.

  Met him pike hoses.

  Had Sir Thomas Beecham ever conducted any Stockhausen?

  No. But he believed he had trodden in some.

  Before the Euro, the portrait of Yeats on Ireland’s twenty-pound note.

  America’s Whitman twenty-dollar bill, when?

  The Melville ten?

  One of the rare pieces of expository writing by a woman in antiquity — a list of rules for behavior when visiting an exclusive house of prostitution.

  Left by one Gnathaena, in third-century Athens, and actually catalogued in the great library of Alexandria until its destruction.

  No more than ten or twelve weeks after an actress he had been living with took her own life, Gottfried Benn was engaged to another woman.

  1427–1429. Being the closest one can evidently come to a date for the death of Masaccio.

  The Threepenny Opera. For which Brecht stole much of the language from someone else’s German translation of the original John Gay version — and for which he was ultimately forced to surrender part of his royalties.

  Truth lies at the bottom of a well.

  Cicero says Democritus said.

  Truth lies at the bottom of a well.

  Rabelais says Heraclitus said.

  I’ve had it with those cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

  Growled Kenneth Rexroth.

  Novelist does not own a cat, and thus most certainly could not have thrown one out a window.

  Nonetheless he would lay odds that more than one hopscotch-ing reviewer will be reading carelessly enough here to never notice these two sentences and announce that he did so.

  God help us, did I not tell your Grace that those were nothing but windmills?

  All cats are grey in the dark.

  What would non-creative writing be?

  George Steiner once casually wondered.

  Musicke, the Elizabethan spelling was.

  Hydeous. Swolne. Perswasion. Sinne. Subtill.

  Brightnesse falls from the ayre.

  He would not blow his nose without moralising on the state of the handkerchief industry.

  Said Cyril Connolly of Orwell.

  Billy Graham’s anti-Semitic exchange with Richard Nixon, as preserved on White House tapes.

  E. M. Forster lived with his mother until her death when he was sixty-six.

  Children of Palestrina, Verdi referred to Italian composers as.

  Bastien-Lepage was dead at thirty-six.

  Aubrey Beardsley was dead at twenty-five.

  The somewhat notorious soprano Susanna Cibber. Who sang so movingly in an early performance of Handel’s Messiah that a Dublin bishop informed her afterward that any and all of her earthly sins were therewith irrevocably forgiven.

  Charlotte Brontë died in March of 1855.

  The Reverend Arthur Nicholls, whom she had married nine months before, would live until 1906.

  A daughter of Dickens lived until 1929.

  After Jean Stafford, vacationing, had explained to a weathered Wyoming ranch hand how she made her living:

  That’s real nice work. I reckon you can even always arrange to do it in the shade.

  Wondering why it always seems somehow not quite accurate — that Mozart was born only fourteen years before Beethoven.

  Now I’ll have eine kleine pause.

  Said Kathleen Ferrier — dying.

  British cavalry in the Crimean War were so scandalously ill-supplied and neglected that many starved to death — as did the very horses that had survived the Charge of the Light Brigade.

  February 2, 1940, Meyerhold was executed on.

  Picasso, avec laughter, after being asked if he had used models for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon:

  Where would I have found them?

  A dreadful old fraud.

  Edmund Wilson called Robert Frost.

  A sententious, holding-forth old bore who expected every hero-worshipping adenoidal little twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word.

  James Dickey would elaborate subsequently.

  Edith Piaf was four feet eight inches tall.

  George Lyman Kittredge, who taught Shakespeare at Harvard for forty-eight years — and demanded that all of his students memorize at least six hundred lines per semester.

  Six hundred lines. The student reciting the entire To be or not to be soliloquy has mastered all of thirty-five.

  Alexander the Great once watched in puzzlement as Diogenes sifted through a heap of human bones.

  How strange, Diogenes finally decided — that I cannot make a distinction between those of your father and those of his slaves.

  Ephesus, Mary Magdalen died in.

  Ephesus, the Virgin Mary may have died in.

  José Clemente Orozco lost his left hand in a college chemistry explosion.

  Mr. McChoakumchild, Dickens names the demanding schoolmaster in Hard Times.

  Almost an insult to the serious reader, Shaw said.

  An abridged, accelerated, night-school course.

  Eugenio Montale saw in Pound’s version of culture in the Cantos.

  Oh, Aaron Burr, what hast thou done?

  Thou hast shooted dead that great Hamilton.

  For a millennium, or longer, Greek and then Roman seamen along the coast of the Troad repeatedly insisted they had seen the ghosts of Achilles and/or Hector in full armor at the shore.

  After Vicente Aleixandre’s Nobel Prize, Madrid renamed the street on which he lived in his honor.

  Which was to say that one could then write to Sr. Vicente Aleixandre — on Calle Vicente Aleixandre.

  There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet.

  Suspected Elizabeth Bishop.

  A remedy once sugge
sted by Camille Pissarro for the betterment of French art:

  Burn down the Louvre.

  What I have always liked about this place are the windows.

  Determined Bonnard, strolling through the same museum.

  Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.

  A quirky new impulse of Novelist’s, at news of several recent deaths — Dialing the deceased, in the likelihood that no one would have yet disconnected their answering machines — and contemplating their voices one eerie final time.

  A trampish sort of appearance.

  Iris Murdoch recalled re Wittgenstein.

  Joyce himself is an insignificant man, wearing very thick eyeglasses, dull, self-centered.

  Says Virginia Woolf ’s diary.

  Reality is under no obligation to be interesting.

  Said Borges.

  December 31, 1936, Unamuno died on.

  October 18, 1955, Ortega.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt, well into his political career, at least once wrote a book review.

  Bach was fifteen when he began his professional music career.

  As a boy soprano.

  A quart or more of alcohol per day, uncounted amphetamines, uncounted aspirin, uncounted barbiturates — and at a minimum two packs of cigarettes.

  Being Sartre in his most productive years.

  The novels of Paul de Kock, which are admired by Molly Bloom.

  As they were in fact by Karl Marx.

  Dear President George W. Bush:

  Herewith please find uncorrected proofs for the newly discovered rewritten version of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Kindly limit your review to twelve thousand words. Thank you.

  John Kenneth Galbraith was made to repeat his senior year in high school.

  Scarcely intelligible, Dryden labeled Shakespeare’s language.

  Quote: His whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is coarse.

  A jockey can earn more in one race than a schoolteacher is paid in an entire year.

  Objected Juvenal — close to nineteen hundred years ago.

  He who today writes artistically dies without recognition or reward.

  Complained Lope de Vega — in 1609.