The Last Novel

by David Markson

  Frank Raymond Leavis.

  John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

  A century before Alcoholics Anonymous, something called the Sons of Temperance, Poe did make a stab at. To no avail.

  Inscribed on a painting by Jacob Jordaens:

  Nihil similius insano quam ebrius — Nothing is more similar to a lunatic than a drunkard.

  According to Liszt, Chopin had blue eyes.

  According to everyone else they were brown.

  The man who eats in idleness what he has not earned is a thief.

  Wrote Rousseau.

  Catherine the Great died after having suffered a stroke and fallen from a commode in the royal water closet.

  Eric Andrews here. Well, actually not here. But I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Please wait for the signal.

  Giuseppe Ungaretti’s father was a construction worker on the Suez Canal.

  The Homeric combat between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal at a 1977 cocktail party — In which Mailer threw a drink into Vidal’s face — and Vidal bit Mailer on the finger.

  Chipping Sodbury General Hospital, near Bristol, J. K.

  Rowling was born at.

  Rilke’s over-sentimentalizing of the poor.

  Did he ever once sit shivering in an attic? Kurt Tucholsky asked.

  Why did Harper Lee never write another novel?

  First, check the acoustics. Then make sure you know where the fire axe is.

  Being Charles Mingus — offering advice re performing in unfamiliar basement jazz clubs.

  Intellectual — hen-pecked you all.

  Being Byron — reaching about as far as possible for a rhyme in Don Juan.

  So exhaustive was Raphael’s study of ancient sculpture in Rome that the city itself named him Keeper of Inscriptions and Remains.

  Prokofiev was fifteen years older than Shostakovich.

  The presumably apocryphal tale about a production of Othello by touring actors in the nineteenth-century American West — near the last lines of which a cowboy in the audience shot Iago dead on the spot.

  Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, Warren Spahn died in.

  Because of having lived openly with George Henry Lewes, who was married, George Eliot was denied burial in Westminster Abbey.

  I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

  The last time anyone mentioned James Jones.

  March 22, 1417, Nicolas Flamel died on.

  In 1760, one year after Handel’s death, a biography by a Reverend John Mainwaring.

  Apparently the first ever written of a composer.

  Like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

  Says an Anthony Powell character about growing old.

  Toscanini’s seven-year affair with Geraldine Farrar — which he ended only when Farrar finally insisted that he leave his wife.

  Ernest Hemingway’s entire front-line service in Italy in World War I, before he was wounded by shell fragments, had added up to less than one week.

  Handing out cigarettes and chocolate at a Red Cross canteen.

  The greatest kindness we can show some of the authors of our youth is not to reread them.

  Said François Mauriac.

  Being reminded that Fermat was a magistrate — for whom mathematics was fundamentally a hobby.

  I am half sick of shadows, said

  The Lady of Shalott.

  Tirra lirra, by the river

  Sang Sir Lancelot.

  Wondering if there is any viable way to convince critics never to use the word tetralogy without also adding that each volume can be readily read by itself?

  Alessandro Manzoni spent five years on the first two drafts of I Promessi Sposi — and twelve more on the final version.

  Lulu slept naked because she liked to feel the sheets caressing her body and also because laundry was expensive.

  Readily read?

  A drawing by Rubens, in Rotterdam, of Achilles driving his spear into Hector’s throat — with his left hand.

  When Homer specifically describes him as using his right.

  The Trojan War will not take place, Cassandra!

  I will make you a bet on that, Andromache.

  — Reads an exchange in Tiger at the Gates.

  I just pretend.

  Explained Laurence Olivier.

  A pale, gentle, frightened little man.

  Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife described a not yet middle-aged Thomas Hardy as.

  Berlioz read every Fenimore Cooper novel as quickly as it appeared.

  And admitted that fully four hours after he finished The Prairie he was still weeping over the death of Natty Bumppo.

  The classic orator Hyperides, who divided his time between homes in Athens, Piraeus, and Eleusis.

  Depending upon which of his mistresses he felt like visiting.

  Georges Simenon’s affair with Josephine Baker.

  Chardin died at eighty — without ever once in his life having ventured farther away from Paris than the forty miles to Fontainebleau.

  Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault.

  Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.

  Johnson told Boswell.

  Chingachgook —

  Pronounced Chicago, I think, said Mark Twain.

  Altogether impoverished in his early years in Paris, for a time Juan Gris did not even possess a bed — and slept on newspapers.

  Kees van Dongen’s admission that there were occasions during his own early Montmartre years when he was forced to filch milk and/or bread from neighborhood doorsteps — with an accomplice named Picasso.

  Let there be Maecenases and there will be no lack of Virgils.

  Said Martial.

  Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it — that’s all right.

  Says a last unfinished letter of van Gogh’s found after his death.

  The poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of inspired madness.

  Said Socrates.

  Gris was dead at forty. Of uremia.

  August 28, 1947, Manolete died on.

  Recalled from Eastern European ghettos, virtually until the very last residents were evacuated to Nazi death camps — schoolchildren reading Yiddish editions of The Prince and the Pauper and Around the World in Eighty Days.

  God of forgiveness, do not forgive those murderers of Jewish children here.

  Said Elie Wiesel, visiting at Auschwitz a half-century later.

  Wait. Don’t carry away that arm till I’ve taken off my ring.

  Said Raglan during surgery after Waterloo.

  Learning that there actually was an apple tree outside Newton’s window at his mother’s home.

  Indeed an entire apple orchard.

  Not a composer. A kleptomaniac.

  Stravinsky called Benjamin Britten.

  The appointment of a woman to public office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.

  Determined Jefferson.

  As many as five little-documented years passed between Shakespeare’s departure from the Globe, at forty-seven or forty-eight, and his death in Stratford.

  After thirty-seven plays, and probably parts of others, plus the poems — did he have no inclination to write anything in those last years?

  Or does there appear a possibility that he sometimes collaborated with others and/or doctored their work anonymously?

  Poetry makes nothing happen.

  Auden said.

  I will not go down to posterity speaking bad grammar.

  Said Disraeli, correcting one of his final speeches.

  Whether posterity will give us a thought I don’t know. But we surely deserve one.

  Wrote Pliny the Younger to Tacitus — in the early second century AD.

  I’m a poet, I’m life. You’re an editor, you’re death.

  Proclaimed Gregor
y Corso to someone in the White Horse Tavern — who shortly commenced punching him through the door and across the sidewalk.

  Taking no more account of the wind that comes out of their mouths than that which they expel from their lower parts.

  Leonardo described his response to critics as.

  Ancora imparo, said Michelangelo at eighty-seven.

  Still, I’m learning.

  More true poetical genius as a painter than possessed by perhaps any other.

  Joshua Reynolds saw in Julio Romano.

  Me retracto de todo lo dicho, I take back everything I told you.

  Announced Nicanor Parra at the end of each of his poetry readings.

  Everything useful is ugly.

  Said Gautier.

  I never saw an ugly thing in my life.

  Said Constable.

  The rumor that Gainsborough deliberately painted his Blue Boy to mock Reynolds’ academic insistence that blue was a color for use in backgrounds only.

  Nicanor Parra’s day job —

  Professor of theoretical physics at the University of Chile.

  Miroslav Holub’s —

  Chief research immunologist at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.

  Dr. Franz Kafka, the gravestone names him.

  Apropos of his Doctor of Laws degree.

  Superimposed metastatic disease would be difficult to exclude in this region.

  Reads a gladsome evaluation in the analysis of Novelist’s most recent bone scan.

  So debilitatingly paranoid was Kurt Gödel in his later years, over imagined plots to poison him, that he essentially refused to eat.

  And died weighing no more than sixty-five pounds.

  Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.

  Says the narrator of a Gilbert Sorrentino story.

  The world has no pity on a man who can’t do or produce something it thinks worth money.

  Says Gissing in New Grub Street.

  And to this day is every scholar poor:

  Gross gold from them runs headlong to the boor.

  Says Marlowe, in Hero and Leander.

  October 8, 1963, Remedios Varo died on.

  We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant.

  Pointed out the disaffected Muslim Wafa Sultan in 2006.

  As Dickensian as anything Dickens ever wrote.

  Graham Greene labeled W. C. Fields.

  Maidservant gallantries, Constanza accused Mozart of.

  Flaubert soils the brook in which he washes.

  Said the critic Saint-Victor of L’Éducation sentimentale.

  M. Flaubert n’est pas un écrivain.

  Said Le Figaro of Madame Bovary.

  Why, this is very midsummer madness.

  We live not as we will — but as we can.

  Said Menander.

  Cocteau, meeting Diaghilev for the first time, and asking what he might do to involve himself in ballet —

  Astonish me, Diaghilev tells him.

  Demodocus, the blind bard whose songs of the fall of Troy evoke tears in Odyssey VIII.

  Could he have perhaps been the source of the legend that Homer himself was blind?

  Languidezza per il caldo — Languidly, because of the heat.

  Suggests Vivaldi’s notation over the Summer segment of The Four Seasons.

  For several hundred years, more than half a millennium after her death, coins bearing Sappho’s likeness were minted on Lesbos.

  In all the centuries since history began, we know of no woman who can truly be said to rival her as a poet.

  Said Strabo, equally as long after her era.

  Rheumatic fever, Robert Burns died of.

  The report that to keep him from sitting with a book for sixteen hours a day, Edmund Wilson’s parents bought him a baseball uniform. Which he happily put on — and sat in with a book for sixteen hours a day.

  By way of an inheritance, Carl Jung’s wife was one of the most wealthy women in Europe.

  Anyone who would employ the word diarrheic to describe a book as exactingly crafted in every line as Ulysses has either never read eleven consecutive words or possesses the literary perception of a rutabaga.

  Ulysses. Diarrheic, unquote. Dale Peck.

  Somewhat similarly, Roddy Doyle. A complete waste of time — Finnegans Wake.

  Though in his instance at least acknowledging that he had read only three pages.

  America’s Emily Dickinson dime?

  Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.

  Once said Richard Brinsley Sheridan to a pretty girl.

  My whole life is messed up with people falling in love with me.

  Once said Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  Even more incomprehensible than the two-century neglect of a painter like Vermeer — the three centuries in which the music of Monteverdi was all but forgotten.

  January 10, 1957, Gabriela Mistral died on.

  Tolstoy’s ruined teeth.

  Gogol’s.

  Admire a small ship, but put your cargo in a large one.

  Hesiod said.

  Savonarola, in one of his inflammatory sermons, directs his words at contemporary artists:

  I tell you, the Virgin dressed herself as a poor woman. And you represent her as a whore.

  This approximately one hundred years before he might have been able to view Caravaggio’s version of her death — effected with such prototypal naturalism that her feet are not clean.

  A critic. Someone who meddles with something that is none of his business.

  Gauguin says Mallarmé said.

  In flight from the Gestapo while a member of the French Resistance, Paul Eluard at one point hid for two months in an insane asylum.

  Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute was first produced in Paris precisely in the middle of a campaign against immorality.

  And had to be advertised with the word Putain blacked out.

  Homer. Euripides. Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

  Being the works that Milton, blind, most frequently asked to have read to him.

  Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

  The last one that Borges asked to hear before his death.

  October 17, 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann died on.

  Sit in thy cell — and thy cell shall teach thee all things.

  Said Saint Anthony.

  Who evidently sat in his own for as long as twenty years without once taking any sort of bath — or even washing his face.

  Lauritz Melchior and Helen Traubel, for years two of the Metropolitan’s central Wagnerians — who expended endless ingenuity in forever attempting to make each other break up into onstage laughter.

  Trying to think of a single book by a significant writer as transparently spurious throughout as A Moveable Feast.

  Wine, the title of John Gay’s first published poem was.

  In which he insisted that no one who drank only water could ever become an author.

  One’s first glass of the day is a great event.

  Acknowledged Thackeray.

  Not drunk is he who from the floor

  Can rise alone and still drink more.

  Contributed Thomas Love Peacock.

  Bo-ray pri ha-gofen.

  A manual-winding pocket watch, Einstein carried.

  Snivel in a wet hanky, D. H. Lawrence called Lord Jim.

  At fifty-eight, two years before his death, Chaucer was sued over a debt of fourteen pounds.

  And did not have the money.

  Gide-ists. Rilke-ists. Fraudulent existential witch doctors. Pallid worms in the cheese of capitalism. Intellectuals.

  Being among Pablo Neruda’s more kindly appellations for authors not concerned with politics.

  Little more than a device for getting revenge upon those who are having a better time on earth.

  Mencken called the Christian concept of immortality.

  Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?

  Inquired someone’s palindrome — after us
e of a bathroom at Faber and Faber.

  Well over a century after Dostoievsky’s death in St. Petersburg, a great-grandson named Dmitri Dostoievsky still lived there — working as a tram driver.

  Twenty-some years after Missolonghi, Teresa Guiccioli married a Parisian marquis — who was known to habitually introduce her as Ma femme, ancienne maîtresse de Byron.

  August Comte married a prostitute.

  Ibsen’s terror of even the smallest dog.

  The morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before.

  Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come.

  Zurbarán died penniless.

  The final entry re Frans Hals, dated September 1, 1666, in the records of the Haarlem Paupers’ Fund — listing four florins for a gravedigger.

  An immense nausea of billboards, Baudelaire spoke of.

  A century and a half ago.

  Closing time in the gardens of the West, Cyril Connolly called it.

  A century after that.

  What can be the sufficient reason for this phenomenon? said Pangloss.

  It is the Last Day! cried Candide.

  A man may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

  Said Samuel Butler.

  Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death.

  Said Wittgenstein.

  Versailles, Edith Wharton was buried in.

  January 8, 1713, Arcangelo Corelli died on.

  Blake’s bust in Westminster Abbey.

  By Jacob Epstein.

  Epstein is a great sculptor. I wish he would wash.

  Said Pound.

  The limpest of handshakes, Robert Graves said Pound had.

  The mirror will not be looked into until you have returned.

  Says a letter from the wife of an ancient Chinese poet.

  Incapacitated by Alzheimer’s disease, de Kooning was once discovered about to spike his coffee with weed killer — presumably thinking it whiskey.

  Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

  The only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to be, Johnson said.

  Chloroform in print.

  Mark Twain called the Book of Mormon.

  Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me.

  Unquote, Gertrude Stein.

  Oh, dear —

  Reportedly having been David Garrick’s dying words.

  Eddie Grant, the pre–World War I third baseman, who graduated from Harvard — and who insisted on shouting I have it instead of I got it when chasing a fly ball.