The Last Novel

by David Markson

  And who as an infantry captain would be killed by machine gun fire in the Argonne Forest.

  Baseball is what we were, football is what we have become.

  Said Mary McGrory.

  Far too much music finishes far too long after the end.

  Judged Stravinsky.

  Still to be read in the blank spaces on some of Raphael’s preliminary sketches for his Vatican stanze frescoes — drafts of love poems to his latest mistress.

  Will Durant’s amusingly unworldly conclusion that the Sappho in Raphael’s Parnassus is — quote — too beautiful to be a lesbian.

  Hark, Hark, the Lark! and Who Is Sylvia?

  Which Schubert set on the same single afternoon.

  The word plagiarism — from the Latin for kidnapping.

  To kidnap another writer’s brains, Martial had it.

  Old Hoss. Old Pete. Old Reliable. Old Folks. Old Aches and Pains.

  Novelist’s personal genre. In which part of the experiment is to continue keeping him offstage to the greatest extent possible — while compelling the attentive reader to perhaps catch his breath when things achieve an ending nonetheless.

  Conclusions are the weak point of most authors.

  George Eliot said.

  If you know what you’re doing, you don’t get intercepted.

  Said Johnny Unitas.

  Eugene Sue, most of whose widely read novels dealt with the poor and downtrodden.

  And thereby made him a millionaire, Kierkegaard noted.

  Picasso, in Paris during the Nazi occupation and learning that someone had accused him of having Jewish blood:

  I wish I had.

  Drawing, for an artist:

  A way of thinking, Valéry termed it.

  February 23, 1931, Nellie Melba died on.

  Let me alone. Good day.

  Said Tom Paine — to the two clergymen who had contrived to make their way to his bedside when he lay dying.

  How long the days for the wretched, how swift for the favored.

  Said Publilius Syrus.

  ’Tis their will — that thy son from this crested wall of Troy be dashed to death.

  The most tragic of the poets.

  Aristotle called Euripides.

  Proust’s excessively lavish over-tipping.

  Gide’s reputation as a cheapskate.

  Coryate, the English traveler, in Venice in 1611:

  When I went to the theatre, I observed certain things I never saw before; for I saw women acte.

  Reminding one that Ophelia, Juliet, Rosalind, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth — were all written to be portrayed by adolescent boys.

  Until 1660, when one Margaret Hughes broke the English barrier as Desdemona.

  Typhus, or his syphilis, caused Beethoven’s deafness — question mark.

  A rejection of all that civilization has done.

  Said the London Times of a first Post-Impressionist exhibition, in 1910 — which included Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, others.

  Just an old queen, Auden spoke of himself as.

  While also referring to Miss God.

  One never steps twice into the same Auden.

  Randall Jarrell said.

  Seneca’s Thyestes, in which Thyestes unknowingly eats the flesh of his own children.

  And is described as belching contentedly.

  Twickenham, Alexander Pope was buried in.

  Wondering how on earth one remembers — that when St.

  John of the Cross escaped after his near death by starvation in a Toledo prison, the first meal he was given, at a discalced Carmelite convent — was of pears simmered with cinnamon.

  A good man — but he did not know how to paint.

  Said El Greco of Michelangelo.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., at eighty-seven, seen turning to gaze after an attractive girl:

  Oh, to be seventy again!

  I must ever have some Dulcinea in my head — it harmonises the soul.

  Said Laurence Sterne.

  The pain of rereading Twelfth Night after far too many years and coming upon the end of the Clown’s song in II.iii —

  Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,

  Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

  Old age is not for sissies.

  Said Bette Davis.

  Tell me honestly, Cal. Am I as good a poet as Shelley?

  Asked William Carlos Williams, not long before his death, of Robert Lowell.

  Freud, born in 1856, being asked in 1936 how he felt:

  How a man of eighty feels is not a topic for conversation.

  Shaw, at ninety-four, being asked the same:

  At my age, one is either well or dead.

  Leukemia, Ernestine Schumann-Heink died of.

  He was greater than we thought.

  Said Degas at the funeral of Manet.

  Apollinaire, who was severely wounded in World War I.

  And then died of influenza two days before the Armistice.

  December 8, 1918, Cpl. David Markson died on.

  Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

  Declares a line in Rasselas.

  The Rokeby Venus. Which was purchased in Yorkshire in the early 1800s for five hundred pounds.

  And sold to the National Gallery in 1906 for ninety times that amount.

  Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson died in.

  The Marquesas, Gauguin.

  Tchaikovsky, Glinka, Borodin, Mussorgsky — all buried in the same St. Petersburg cemetery.

  Diogenes, asking to be buried face downward —

  Because the world will soon enough be turned upside down.

  Every man is condemned to death — but with an indefinite reprieve.

  Hugo said.

  Those who know do not speak.

  Those who speak do not know.

  Forty-two, Kierkegaard died at.

  There’s nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

  Said Paul Celan.

  It would have been our pleasure to be bombed.

  Said a survivor of Auschwitz.

  August 8, 1596, Hamnet Shakespeare died on.

  July 11, 1649, Susanna Shakespeare Hall died on.

  February 7, 1662, Judith Shakespeare Quinney died on.

  Virgil’s ceaseless revisions of the Aeneid.

  Writing only a few lines at a time and then licking them into shape as the she-bear does its cubs, Suetonius says he said.

  One man is as good as another until he has written a book.

  Said Benjamin Jowett.

  To an astronomer, man is but an insignificant dot in an infinite universe — said whoever.

  Though that insignificant dot is also the astronomer — said Einstein.

  Please don’t get up, I’m only passing through.

  No more firing was heard at Brussels — the pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.

  What he had seen, was it a battle? And if so, was that battle Waterloo?

  Thy labours shall outlive thee.

  Wrote John Fletcher in lines dedicated to Ben Jonson.

  Who spent his last years partially paralyzed and virtually alone — and in calamitous want.

  Wondering when the last day may have passed—anywhere in the world — during which someone did not die in an act of religion-inspired terrorism.

  Just glance around you: wars, catastrophes and disasters, hatreds and persecutions, death awaiting us at every side.

  Commented Ionesco.

  Acheron. Cocytus. Styx. Phlegethon. Pyriphlegethon. Lethe.

  Late February or early March, 1945.

  Anne Frank.

  What see’st thou else

  In the dark backward and abysm of time?

  His powers of mind have almost entirely left him; h
is late paintings are miserable; it is really a lamentable thing that a man should outlive his faculties.

  Said Samuel Morse after a visit with an elderly John Singleton Copley.

  You don’t always make an out. Sometimes the pitcher gets you out.

  Said Carl Yastrzemski.

  In the long run we are all dead.

  Noted Keynes.

  When I went to America, my very first inquiry was concerning Melville. There was some slight evidence that he was alive, and I heard from Mr. E. C. Stedman, who seemed much astonished at my interest in the subject, that Melville was dwelling somewhere in New York.

  Charidas, what is it like down there?

  All darkness.

  And resurrection?

  All a lie.

  — Quoth Callimachus.

  Minor authors — who lived, men knew not how, and died obscure, men marked not when.

  Roger Ascham takes notice of.

  Those rare intellects who, not only without reward, but in miserable poverty, brought forth their works.

  Vasari likewise commemorates.

  One must go on working. And one must have patience.

  Rodin told Rilke.

  My time will come.

  Said Gregor Mendel, ignored throughout his life.

  On van Gogh’s bier at Auvers-sur-Oise — clusters of golden sunflowers.

  Brought by Dr. Gachet.

  The report that Osip Mandelstam spent the last hours before his death in Siberia reading Petrarch — by firelight.

  O lente lente currite noctis equi.

  Verdi’s funeral — which according to his own wishes was conducted without music.

  Verdi’s.

  Though in fact he had asked that the score of his Te Deum, one of the Four Sacred Pieces, be placed in his coffin.

  Regensburg, Johannes Kepler was buried in.

  Where there, long unknown.

  My old paintings no longer interest me. I’m much more curious about those I haven’t done yet.

  Said Picasso, at seventy-nine.

  Kynge Arthur is nat dede but shall come agayne.

  I’m cold, Snowden said. I’m cold.

  For sundry doctrinal reasons, the Archbishop of Paris refused to sanction a Catholic burial for Colette.

  Conversely, France itself granted her a state funeral — making her the first woman ever so honored.

  Give me your arm, old toad;

  Help me down Cemetery Road.

  I have often thought of death, but now it is never out of mind.

  Said Swift, in his late sixties — a decade before it actually occurred.

  You can tell from my handwriting that I am in the twenty-fourth hour. Not a single thought is born in me that does not have death graven within.

  Wrote Michelangelo at eighty-one — himself with eight years remaining.

  The long littleness of life.

  Frances Cornford speaks of.

  As he reclined at table, there arose a question what sort of death was best. At which he immediately, before anyone could speak, said, A sudden one.

  Says Dryden’s Plutarch, re Caesar.

  Philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

  Wittgenstein once suggested.

  Merde pour la poésie.

  Decided Rimbaud.

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  Being William Dunbar — The fear of death distresses me.

  And which Novelist is quite certain he has quoted before in his life.

  Memento mori.

  Any man if he is all alone becomes more aware of being lonely as he ages.

  Said Eliot.

  Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death; yet there is no man, says Tully, who does not believe that he may yet live another year.

  Johnson is somewhere reminded.

  The last act is tragic, however happy all the rest of the play.

  Perceives Pascal.

  Lorenzo da Ponte’s memoirs — in which Mozart is practically never mentioned.

  I’ve no more sight, no hand, nor pen, nor inkwell. I lack everything. All I still possess is will.

  Said Goya — nearing eighty.

  With an ink too thick, with foul pens, with bad sight, in gloomy weather, under a dim lamp, I have composed these pages. Do not scold me for it!

  Appended Telemann to the score of some light soprano airs — written at eighty-one.

  Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on.

  What happens in the end?

  Oh, in the end she dies.

  Twenty-five years after his death, Poe’s remains were disinterred from what had been little better than a pauper’s grave and reburied more formally.

  Walt Whitman, who made the journey from Camden to Baltimore in spite of being disabled from a recent stroke, was the only literary figure to appear at the ceremonies.

  O that it were possible

  We might but hold some two days’ conference

  With the dead.

  — Laments Webster’s Duchess.

  Celan’s recollection that his mother had never had white hair.

  Because of having been murdered in a concentration camp while still too young.

  Cézanne, who lived in greater and greater isolation, late in life.

  Degas, who lived in greater and greater isolation, late in life.

  A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles, and is there one who understands me?

  dein goldenes Haar Margarete

  dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

  In addition to his name and date on the frame of a portrait by Jan van Eyck:

  Als ick kan — The best I can do.

  Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

  Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

  Saint Gildas the Wise, of Wales, who asked that at his death he be placed in a small boat and set adrift at sea.

  Sophocles, re a tremor in his hand, as recorded by Aristotle:

  He said he could not help it; he would happily rather not be ninety years old.

  It is later than you know.

  Printed Baudelaire onto the face of his clock — after having broken off its hands.

  There is always more time than you anticipate.

  Said Malcolm Lowry. For whom there wasn’t.

  I was much further out than you thought

  And not waving but drowning.

  — Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo.

  I too have written some good books.

  Said Nietzsche, overhearing someone’s reference to literature in a fleeting moment’s lucidity during his final madness.

  Having died they are not dead.

  Wrote Simonides of the Spartans slain at Plataea.

  Keats, in a last letter some weeks before the end, telling a friend it is difficult to say goodbye:

  I always made an awkward bow.

  Tiny drops of water will hollow out a rock.

  Lucretius wrote.

  Als ick kan. Which Novelist finds himself several times repeating, even while not even sure in what language — is it six-hundred-year-old Flemish? And uncertain as to why he is caught up by van Eyck’s use of it. That’s it, I can do no more? All I have left? I can go no further?

  Als ick kan?

  Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.

  Said H. G. Wells.

  The world began without man, and it will end without him.

  Said Lévi-Strauss.

  Swiftly the years, beyond recall.

  Solemn the stillness of this spring morning.

  — Reads the Arthur Waley translation of a Chinese fragment.

  One man is born; another dies.

  Being Euripides.

  After death, nothing is.

  Being Seneca.

  The old man who will not laugh is a fool.

  Said Santayana.

  When Grandpa dies and his ashes ar
e dropped into the ocean, may I have just a little bit of them? To put into something nice, so I can keep Grandpa with me for all time?

  Pulvis et umbra sumus.

  Quoth Horace. We are but dust and a shadow.

  Dispraised, infirm, unfriended age.

  Sophocles calls it.

  Unregarded age in corners thrown.

  Shakespeare echoes.

  The worn copy of Donne’s verses, inked throughout with notes in Coleridge’s handwriting. And at the rear:

  I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb, and then you will not be sorry that I bescribbled your book.

  I am weary, Ananda, and wish to lie down.

  Bhartrihari, fully fourteen hundred years ago, bemoaning the poverty of poets — in Sanskrit.

  Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,

  Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

  Be patient now, my soul, thou hast endured worse than this.

  Odysseus once says.

  Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?

  Is it true then, what they say — that we become stars in the sky when we die?

  Asks someone in Aristophanes.

  Access to Roof for Emergency Only.

  Alarm Will Sound if Door Opened.

  Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.

  The old man who will not laugh is a fool.

  Als ick kan.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Table of Contents

  The Last Novel