The Last Novel

by David Markson

  Landlords in lower Manhattan who were shrewd enough, over the years, to accept recent work by moneyless young artists instead of rent.

  One of those, in the late 1940s, who wasn’t — and rather than two paintings by Robert Rauschenberg insisted upon the month’s $15.

  Jaroslav Seifert, like Dostoievsky earlier, who once eluded execution only moments before the shots were to be fired.

  Yet afterward insisted he was no more traumatized by the recollection than a youngster remembering last year’s measles.

  The nephew of Aeschylus named Philocles, also a playwright, all of whose plays are lost.

  But who was talented enough to gain the prize for tragedy in the year when Sophocles presented Oedipus Rex.

  A cask of brandy, Nelson’s corpse was brought back to London in, after Trafalgar.

  To slow decomposition.

  Agonies of galloping speechlessness.

  Beckett once talked of a writer’s block as.

  When you can see the bandwagon, it’s already gone.

  Said de Kooning.

  Late-life Nietzsche postcards — that he signed Kaiser Nietzsche.

  Freakish, Voltaire called the Divine Comedy.

  Extravagant, absurd, disgusting.

  Horace Walpole made it.

  According to Ford Madox Ford, Flaubert once opened his front door to Henry James and Ivan Turgenev in his dressing gown — and thus offended James’s sensibilities virtually beyond redemption.

  The nicest old lady I ever met.

  Faulkner decided to christen James.

  Multiple surgical chain staples are evident in the right lung, consistent with prior resections.

  Reads a recurrent notation in reports on Novelist’s chest x-rays.

  A post-Mao version of the Long March — which implies that forcibly conscripted porters carried him on a litter for much of the 5,000 miles.

  All the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution.

  Said William Jennings Bryan — in 1924.

  Abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians — all in good part responsible for 9/11, said Jerry Falwell.

  I totally concur. Said Pat Robertson.

  David Gascoyne’s addiction to Benzedrene. And lighter-fluid fumes.

  Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars.

  Remembering that Charles Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey.

  Fundamentalismbecility.

  Django Reinhardt died of a cerebral hemorrhage — while fishing in the Seine.

  People who actually believe that Damien Hirst’s fourteen-foot shark in a tank of formaldehyde has something even remotely to do with art.

  Our father who art in heaven

  Stay there.

  Requested Jacques Prévert.

  Tamara Geva. Vera Zorina. Maria Tallchief. Tanaquil Le Clercq.

  All of whom married George Balanchine.

  Offensive, ill-written, mechanical. All in all, detestable.

  Sainte-Beuve called the novels of Stendhal.

  I count only on being reprinted in 1900.

  Said Stendhal himself, who died in 1842.

  I shall hear in heaven.

  Which Beethoven did or did not say, nearing death.

  Do Not Leave Car Unattendant.

  Jean Giono was twice imprisoned for collaboration with the Nazis in World War II.

  Englishing Pindar is so exacting, concluded Abraham Cowley, that if one were to attempt it literally it would sound as if one certifiable lunatic had translated another.

  Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov were for a time roommates.

  The first use of the word classic in its long since traditional sense — by the Latin critic Aulus Gellius, ca. 180 AD.

  I am no Einstein.

  Once said Einstein.

  Pope Eliot.

  Dylan Thomas called him.

  Michelangelo’s David stood on the open porch of the Palazzo Vecchio, where Michelangelo had asked that it be placed, from 1504 until 1873 — when Florence moved it into the Academy and out of the weather.

  And to where some cretin a hundred and twenty years later would take a hammer to its left foot.

  Only a single, incomplete manuscript of the Annals of Tacitus remained extant after the Dark Ages.

  August 21, 2005, Dahlia Ravikovitch died on.

  Pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world —

  Reads an Isak Dinesen description of a herd of elephants.

  The ménage à trois involving Paul and Gala Eluard and Max Ernst — After which Gala became Gala Dalí.

  Simone de Beauvoir’s affair with Nelson Algren.

  Which she later infuriated him by writing about.

  A leper and a sodomite.

  Emerson called Swinburne.

  Like a vile scum on a pond.

  Pound viewed G. K. Chesterton.

  Landskip, painters long spoke of it as.

  Dreiser, years in advance, telling H. L. Mencken that he has already prepared his dying words:

  Shakespeare, I come.

  Alan Turing was dead at forty-one.

  You don’t have a computer? So how do you write your books?

  You don’t still use a typing machine?

  Wondering if anyone, ever, has listened to Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance march without repeated irrepressible grins of delight?

  I fear that I have just seen the greatest actor in the world.

  Said Sarah Bernhardt of Nijinsky.

  He eats with his knife and accompanies every gesture, every movement of his hand, with that implement, which he grasps firmly when he commences his meal and never puts down until he leaves the table.

  Said Mary Cassatt re Cézanne — and what she also described as his total disregard for the dictionary of manners, unquote.

  The likelihood that Lenin died of syphilis.

  Raymond Chandler did not publish his first novel until he was fifty.

  Dashiell Hammett published his fifth novel at thirty-nine — and not one thing else in the remaining twenty-seven years of his life.

  Great Empedocles, that ardent soul,

  Leapt into Etna, and was roasted whole.

  Oh, that flagon, that wicked flagon! thought Rip — what excuse shall I make to Dame Van Winkle?

  Chekhov’s grandfather had been a serf.

  The speculation that Horace’s father, himself a manumitted slave, might also have been a Jew.

  December 11, 1513, Pintoricchio died on.

  So excessively did Shaw admire Strindberg that he actually used the money from his Nobel Prize to arrange for better English translations of Strindberg’s plays.

  John Steinbeck, asked if he felt he had in fact deserved his own Nobel Prize:

  Frankly, no.

  Thomas Nashe was dead at thirty-one. Where, of what, or even exactly when, remains unknown.

  Zapata was thirty-nine when he was murdered.

  Stephen Dedalus, at Sandymount, in 1904.

  Is he aware that Yeats was born there?

  Trollope’s declaration that he wrote with his watch on the desk in front of him — so that he could be certain he had produced at least two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour.

  The measure of a man’s greatness would be in terms of what his work cost him.

  Wittgenstein once told someone.

  Picasso’s admiration for Charlie Chaplin.

  Diego Rivera’s.

  Stalin’s.

  As early as in Plutarch:

  Let them who can do nothing better, teach.

  Mr. Churchill, you are drunk.

  And you, Madame, are ugly. But I shall be sober tomorrow.

  The novels of Susan Sontag:

  Self-indulgent overrated crap, the Kevin Costner character calls them in the movie Bull Durham.

  From a letter of Balzac’s, in his mid-thirties, recording that in a fit of creative frenzy he had just spent twenty-six consecutive days without once le
aving his study:

  Sometimes it seems to me that my very brain is on fire.

  No further martinis after dinner, Conrad Aiken’s physician once commanded.

  Following which Aiken frequently refused to eat until practically bedtime.

  If they do see fields blue, they are deranged, and should go to an asylum. If they only pretend to see them blue, they are criminals, and should go to prison.

  Being Hitler — re artists he categorized as degenerate.

  I shall fight as long as I live. And I shall not consider it more important to be alive than to be free.

  Rang the first words of an oath taken by Athenians before battle.

  The eighteenth-century evangelist George Whitefield. Whose pulpit voice was so effective, said David Garrick, that he could make listeners laugh or cry by no more than pronouncing the word Mesopotamia.

  Gertrude Stein’s Model T style, Elizabeth Hardwick called it.

  There is one rule that can render your hand so light that the brush will float, says Cennino Cennini’s handbook for painters, ca. 1435:

  Do not enjoy too much the company of women.

  Every drop of sperm spilled is a masterpiece lost.

  Said Piet Mondrian, five hundred years later.

  A damsel with a dulcimer

  In a vision once I saw.

  Piero della Francesca’s Nativity. In which Joseph has removed the saddle of an ass to use as a seat — while the ass itself brays in the background.

  Erik Satie lived the entire later half of his life in extreme indigence.

  Incredulity that Schubert’s Eighth Symphony — the Unfinished — was not once performed until thirty-seven years after his death.

  Toasted Susie is my ice cream.

  Pythagoras’s insistence that in one of his earlier incarnations he had fought in the Trojan War.

  In fact that he had been Euphorbus, who in the Iliad wounds Patroclus and is in turn killed by Menelaus.

  Borges’ vision of Paradise:

  A kind of library.

  The long-hoped-for opportunity to meet Byron that Schopenhauer turned away from at the last moment — when the woman he was with evinced far too much enthusiasm of her own about it.

  Epi oinopa ponton.

  Walter Scott’s novels generally cost him innumerable hours of hunting through reference books.

  Which were forever heaped up precariously on the floor below his desk.

  In addition to Italian, Leopardi possessed effortless mastery of Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, English, and Hebrew — by the age of sixteen.

  October 21, 1969, Jack Kerouac died on.

  Romain Rolland never learned which side won World War II.

  Wondering how many lifetime scribes and/or manuscript copyists were put out of work in the decades immediately after Gutenberg?

  Wondering why the plural of still life is still lifes and not still lives?

  Sofa-size.

  Simone Weil was dead at thirty-four.

  You have reached Ned Klein. Please leave a message after the beep.

  When I am eighty, my art may finally begin to cohere. By ninety, it may truly turn masterful.

  Said Hokusai. At seventy-three.

  Windy humbuggeries.

  Mark Twain found in Scott.

  A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth-rate in Europe.

  Faulkner once called Twain in turn.

  The 2005 Vienna exhibition featuring erotic paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele — at which patrons arriving nude or in skimpy bathing suits were admitted free.

  Colossal ennui. It seems to me that I could write something like it tomorrow by taking inspiration from the cat walking over the keyboard on my piano.

  Said Prosper Mérimée of Tannhäuser.

  It is impossible to finish any of his plays, they are pitiful.

  Claimed Napoleon re Shakespeare.

  A lot of twaddle.

  Confirmed George III.

  More than sixty percent of the people in the United States do not know what the capitalized word Holocaust in its common contemporary usage stands for.

  Assuming that Saul Bellow was aware of the Moses Herzog mentioned in passing in Ulysses?

  A desperate Stevie Smith addict.

  Sylvia Plath called herself.

  April 16, 1958, Rosalind Franklin died on.

  Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.

  Declared a Utah senator named Orrin Hatch — presumably a former honors student in Logic 101.

  Clov: What is there to keep me here?

  Hamm: The dialogue.

  The Girl of the Golden West, Act III — in which the soprano arrives on stage on horseback.

  Renata Tebaldi was petrified.

  One of the earliest translations of the Bible in America — into Mohawk.

  At one juncture during his years as a customs inspector on the New York docks, Melville was forced to take a cut in salary — from $4.00 to $3.60 per day.

  Oscar Hammerstein’s first job in America, in a cigar factory, paid him two dollars a week.

  Andrew Carnegie’s, in a cotton mill, had paid $1.50 — for twelve-hour days.

  Washington Square, in Greenwich Village, Edward Hopper died in.

  Washington Square, in Greenwich Village, Novelist also happens to be typing this last book only short blocks away from.

  Lorenzo de’ Medici, who commissioned Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, ca. 1485.

  And a dozen or so years later sent Amerigo Vespucci sailing westward.

  To cause justice to prevail in the land.

  To prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.

  To better the welfare of the people.

  — Read portions of the Code of Hammurabi — from what may have been as early as 1800 BC.

  Anthony Burgess’s bad eyesight.

  Which permitted him to once enter a bank in Stratford-on-Avon — and order a drink.

  Lloyd George knew my father,

  Father knew Lloyd George.

  In 1907, Caruso was being paid $2,000 per performance at the Metropolitan.

  $2,000 in 1907 currency.

  The uncanny sense of atmosphere in certain Constable landscapes.

  So that looking at them could make one worry that he might need an umbrella, Fuseli said.

  Remembering next to nothing about The Courtship of Miles Standish — except that Longfellow himself was in fact descended from Priscilla and John Alden.

  Mozart wrote his Thirty-Sixth Symphony, the Linz, in at most three days.

  In the period when artists of stature were called upon to paint likenesses of hunted murderers on the walls of Florentine buildings, Andrea del Castagno’s led to so many captures that he became known as Andrea degli Impiccati — Andrea of the Hanged.

  Bach almost persuades me to be a Christian.

  Roger Fry said.

  January 11, 1966, Giacometti died on.

  The Marquis de Sade was at least once arrested for sodomy.

  And once for severely beating a young woman.

  While also being implicated in the deaths of two prostitutes after an overdose of aphrodisiacs during an orgy.

  Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after about six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?

  We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention.

  Said Richard Serra.

  I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.

  Said Wayne Gretzky.

  Ivy Compton-Burnett died after a bronchitis attack.

  Martin Luther King’s seminary studies — during which he received a grade of C in public speaking.

  A street in Nice is named after Marie Bashkirtseff.

  Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.

  Said Rebecca West.

  He started off writing very well, then you can see his going mad with vanity. He ends up a lunatic.<
br />
  Added Evelyn Waugh.

  Very dirty and completely worthless.

  Edith Sitwell called Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  Wholly ignorant.

  Waugh called Sitwell.

  Wonderful, this death.

  Allegedly said William Etty, as it occurred.

  Oliver Goldsmith was the oldest member of his graduating class at Trinity College, Dublin.

  And the lowest ranked.

  Proust, in the equivalent of basic training during his one year of military service at eighteen, was ranked seventy-third in a platoon of seventy-four.

  An incomparable painting by Apelles, which Augustus brought from Cos to Rome, where it was slightly damaged.

  And where not one contemporary Roman artist had the confidence to attempt to restore it.

  Auden’s notion that one could readily imagine a young Tolstoy or Stendhal or Dostoievsky in a bar fight.

  But Henry James, never.

  There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.

  Concluded Kelvin. In 1900.

  I would go to considerable expense and inconvenience to avoid his company.

  Quoth John Cheever — re John Updike.

  Euripides’ father may have been a tavern-keeper.

  Still curious all these years later as to why Faulkner would have given two of his major characters names then current in widely syndicated comic strips.

  Though for that matter he gave three others the names of buildings on the University of Mississippi campus.

  A passage in Montaigne where he speaks of himself as being well on the road to old age — having long since passed forty.

  Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of forty-two.

  Writes Daisy Ashford.

  Anacreon, so highly acclaimed as a poet that the Athenians placed a statue of him on the Acropolis.

  And so well known for other proclivities that Pausanias says the statue showed him drunk.

  November 30, 1943, Etty Hillesum died on.

  I become insane, with long intervals of horrible insanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drink, God only knows how often or how much.

  Wrote Poe to a friend.

  Reading a book in translation:

  Like gazing at a Flemish tapestry with the wrong side turned out, said Cervantes.

  Traduttore, traditore — translator, traitor, the Italian has it.

  Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, his full name was.