David Markson - Reader's Block

Richard Tucker and Jan Peerce were also.

When Sophocles was nearing ninety, his sons tried to have him declared incompetent. Sophocles won easy dismissal by reading to the jury from Oedipus at Colonus.

Which he was only then finishing.

Schleiermacher.

Then again, Reader may let Protagonist’s ex-wife look like Isabella d’Este.

Who was painted by both Leonardo and Titian.

The termites has got me, Mr. Mack.

Wallace Stevens’s wife Elsie was the model for the face on the United States dime and half-dollar.

Wallace Stevens’s wife Elsie and Wallace Stevens had separate bedrooms.

Hopkins to Robert Bridges: I am a eunuch, but it is for the Kingdom of God’s sake.

Baudelaire spent two hours a day getting dressed.

Irgun.

Honor, power, wealth, fame, love of women.

Algernon Swinburne’s father was an admiral.

When I could have used a wife, I could not support one; when I could support one, I no longer needed any.

Said Kant.

Why has Reader always automatically assumed that the skull beside his desk is a man’s?

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Ernestine Schumann-Heink. Elisabeth Schumann. Eleanor Steber. Elisabeth Soderstrom. Ebe Stignani. Elena Suliotis. Erna Sack.

Being a successful reader of poetry on stage, said Akhmatova, is not necessarily the same as being a writer of successful poetry.

Snorri Sturluson was assassinated.

Twenty American publishers rejected Elie WiesePs Night.

Browning’s Sordello contains 5983 lines. Tennyson said he understood two of them.

Holbein died of plague.

Percy Bridgman committed suicide.

Photographs of anyone other than his children, has Protagonist kept?

Of himself with?

T. E. Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash.

Thomas Campion’s songs were essentially forgotten for well over two centuries.

But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house.

Igor Stravinsky was an anti-Semite.

Being sent to a dictionary at fifteen for eleemosynary on the first page of Tom Jones. Has Reader come upon the word twice since?

Give him a jugful and he will write one hundred poems. Said Tu Fu of Li Po.

He dozes in a wine shop

On a city street in Chang-an.

Saint Luke was hanged from an olive tree.

Or may have died a natural death at eighty-four.

I cannot survive on a miserable organist’s job, as your Master Bach did.

Johnny Keats’s piss-a-bed poetry, Byron called it.

Other women for Protagonist’s background, should Reader add?

A lithe, dark-eyed girl named Christine, who danced? And even in repose seemed always moving?

Becky Sharp. Maggie Tulliver.

How many years past? How recently will Protagonist have ever seen her since?

Philip Rahv committed suicide.

Aesop was executed for embezzlement.

By the early Middle Ages, every third church in Europe claimed to possess splinters from the True Cross. Or the nails. Or thorns from the Crown of Thorns. Several heads of John the Baptist existed, and at least as many corpses of Mary Magdalen.

Not to add Christ’s foreskin.

Philip Larkin:

I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.

Kristallnacht.

Edna St. Vincent Millay died at the first light of morning after having sat up all night reading a new translation of the Aeneid.

I have a narrative. But you will be put to it to find it.

None of Andrew Marvell’s best poems was published in his lifetime.

The Queen of Pentacles, Reversed: Certain Evil, a suspicious Woman, a Woman justly regarded with Suspicion, Doubt, Mistrust.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine was an anti-Semite.

Who even well into World War II was still calling for the extermination of every Jew in Europe.

John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart.

Alcuin.

Because of Homer, Troy exerted such an enduring appeal that Julius Caesar contrived to trace his lineage back to its supposed survivors.

A millennium later Geoffrey of Monmouth would do the same for the kings of England.

At thirty-six, Dante was banished from Florence under penalty of death. In his twenty remaining years he would never be back.

Renzo and Lucia.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

The Laocobn was come upon by workmen digging in a vineyard not far from the Colosseum in 1506. In no time, Michelangelo was at the scene. And identified it at once, from descriptions in the elder Pliny.

Shakespeare wanted art.

Nietzsche lost his reason because he thought too much. I do not think and therefore cannot go mad.

Said Nijinsky, mad.

J. Alfred Prufrock: full of high sentence.

Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford: ful of hy sentence.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Said Eliot.

Sartre and Albert Schweitzer were cousins.

William Inge committed suicide.

Kiri Te Kanawa. Keri Hulme.

Did Protagonist leave a forwarding address?

Once, certainly, more of an existence than these cartons and the caw of seagulls?

Beckett wrote Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and Waiting for Godot in less than two years in the late 1940s.

While living on virtually no money other than the few centimes his wife earned by dressmaking.

Napoleon and Karl Marx had hemorrhoids.

As did Wordsworth.

As did Tennessee Williams.

The Unnamed.

In the house on the beach Protagonist is naturally paying rent. In the house at the cemetery, which Reader has thought of as abandoned, is he living more or less illegally?

Protagonist as a squatter?

Jim don’t know nobody in China.

When Dickens, at twelve, worked from 8 A.M. until 8 P.M., six days a week, at the blacking factory, he also walked an hour each way to and from his family’s Camden Town slum.

And spent Sunday visiting his father in debtor’s prison.

What shall I do for pretty girls

Now my old bawd is dead?

Mahatma Gandhi: I see no virtue in being uninformed.

One of Max Planck’s sons was executed for plotting against Hitler.

Housman published a volume entitled Last Poems in 1922.

And lived until 1936.

I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.

Or could Protagonist have been given use of the gatehouse in return for essentially nonexistent custodial duties?

Watchman, what of the night?

Richard Strauss was an anti-Semite.

Brutus committed suicide after the defeat by Antony and Octavian by throwing himself on his sword. Antony removed his own cape to cover the body.

Cassius forced a servant to kill him after the same rout.

I am completely alone here now.

Captured by Moorish pirates at sea, Cervantes spent five years as a slave before being ransomed.

Plato finished the Laws in his late seventies, among other things sanctioning the death penalty for those who question the state religion.

Did he stop to remember how and why Socrates had died fifty years before?

Brandeis. Cardozo. Frankfurter.

Readers were so anxious over the fate of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop that six thousand of them in New York alone actually met the ship carrying the novel’s final installment.

Sir Thomas Browne wished that men could reproduce without intercourse. Like trees, he suggested. Fathering twelve children nevertheless.

Why, I will see thee at Philippi, then.

There is no known portrait of Anne Bradstreet.

Horace was in fact one of Brutus’s officers in Macedonia. But made his way back to Italy safely.

Erasmus was an anti-Semite.