David Markson: Reader's Block

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.

Said Henry James.

George Bernard Shaw was an anti-Semite.

Protagonist first seen poised abstractedly amid a kind of transitory disarray? Cartons heaped and piled?

Innumerable books, Reader presumably means?

The name Kierkegaard translates from the Danish as churchyard.

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea.

Dickens, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Maxim Gorky never finished grade school. Sean O’Casey and Alberto Moravia did not either.

O’Casey, at forty-three, was working with a pick and shovel when his first play was produced.

Where precisely would Protagonist live, if near a derelict cemetery? Possibly some sort of structure just within the grounds themselves?

That building abandoned also? Protagonist possibly stealing electricity through wires connected to the base of a streetlamp outside?

Reader sees a red brick building, in fact. Fairly small and falling into ruin, but of two stories.

None of John Milton’s daughters was given an education, though two of the three were taught to read to him in his blindness.

In languages of which they did not understand one word.

Boethius was executed by having a thong inexorably tightened about his temples.

As a boy, Tennyson could recite all 103 of Horace’s odes from memory.

Montaigne claimed he knew those and the rest of Horace as well.

No life back there at all.

What life here, now?

John Donne posed for a painting in his own shroud. And kept it beside his bed during a long final illness.

Why is Reader always mildly incredulous at remembering that the decimal system arose from counting on one’s fingers?

Several ancient oaks, also within the grounds, partly obscure the house. At night, the single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window is extremely faint.

There are wire mesh fences, in jagged disrepair.

Kathe Kollwitz lost a son in World War I and a grandson in World War II.

Let us read Little Dorrit again. There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep.

According to medieval legend, his pupils stabbed John Scotus Erigena to death with their pens.

Could one, actually, rewire the connections of a streetlamp in that manner?

Salvador Dali’s perception of Jackson Pollock. Fish soup.

On a shelf beside Reader’s desk: a human skull, a reproduction of Giotto’s portrait of Dante, two small rough orange stones.

Hrotswitha van Gandersheim.

In his late sixties, Herman Melville took a four-year-old granddaughter to a park and then forgot her there.

Hospitals, Protagonist will have been in.

And grows older.

Dulcinea del Toboso.

Not far into the story, Robinson Crusoe swims out to the wreck of his ship with no clothes on.

In the selfsame paragraph Defoe has him filling his pockets with biscuits.

Should Reader determine a name for Protagonist at this juncture after all?

Ishmael. Meursault. Harry Haller.

Should he give him children, if he is still being in part autobiographical?

A son and a daughter, then?

Zeno hanged himself after breaking a toe. At ninety.

Alexander Selkirk.

Once, not knowing which of several houses was Bizet’s, Saint-Saens simply stood in the road singing an aria from Les Pecheurs de Perles.

Surely, a clerk from the liquor store where Protagonist had already stopped in two or three times for cheap wine, recognizing him?

At twenty, Joseph Conrad tried to commit suicide over gambling losses. In later life managing to let people believe the bullet wound had come from a duel.

The cemetery is in the oldest section of the town, and the few dwellings on the opposite side of the street, modest and rundown themselves, seem to house very few residents. A point being that no one questions Protagonist’s presence.

Nor is the fence mesh at that, rather it is a more traditional cemetery construction of tall iron spikes. The gate at the entrance is partly unhinged and askew.

The paths inside are of gravel, or were, long since thinned and scattered.

Is there a need to explain the house’s availability?

Obviously a former gatekeeper’s or superintendent’s.

William Butler Yeats was an anti-Semite.

A neighbor once came upon William Blake and his wife Catherine reading Paradise Lost aloud in their garden. Sitting naked.

Robert Moses Grove.

Manet was so vituperatively condemned by critics that for a time he was too embarrassed to ask anyone to pose for him.

Before Cezanne had gained any recognition he once burst into tears when someone sincerely admired his work.

Nothing now, but my books.

Haller’s books? Selkirk’s?

The Persians deployed so many bowmen at Thermopylae that it was said their arrows would blot out the sun.

To which a Spartan commander: All the better, then we will be fighting in the shade.

In his mid-thirties, T. S. Eliot was known to wear pale green face powder. One of the Sitwells said it was to make him look as if he were suffering.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was an American prisoner of war in Italy at the end of World War II.

Should Protagonist possibly have written books of his own once? Unnamed and undescribed, mentioned almost incidentally?

Once, he wrote a few books. That was long ago.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

Rossini wore a wig. In chilly weather he sometimes wore two.

In fact only two Spartans survived Thermopylae. One was killed in battle elsewhere. The other hanged himself in disgrace.

Cervantes was a tax collector during the outfitting of the Armada.

And was imprisoned when his accounts did not balance.

Je crois entendre encore.

Early on, Protagonist will naturally become familiar with most of the gravestones.

Both of Paul Celan’s parents went to their deaths in German concentration camps.

Rudyard Kipling once lived in Vermont.

After Cesare Pavese committed suicide, several young women none of his friends had ever seen before appeared at his funeral weeping, in the hope of being taken for former mistresses.

They make a desert and they call it peace.

The Knight of Pentacles, Reversed: A brave Man, but out of Employment, Idle, Negligent.

Boris Pasternak so admired Rilke that he carried two letters from him in his wallet for decades.

Nothing now, but Protagonist’s books.

Those, and the graves of strangers.

Working as a publisher’s reader, George Meredith rejected The Way of All Flesh.

Working as a publisher’s reader, Andre Gide rejected Swann’s Way.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen.

Or would Reader rather see Protagonist live somewhere else entirely?

An isolated house at a beach, for instance?

Although perhaps without the even more absolute solitude that might establish?

At least with others on a floor above? A woman? Women?

Tomorrow it will rain in Bouville.

Preferably separate entrances. The house on a dune, possibly, with Protagonist and the others coming and going along opposite sides of the slope.

And with Protagonist’s entrance in the rear, a sort of basement? Possibly what had once been an indoor garage?

Ergo almost never seeing these women, merely being aware of their proximity. Or hearing them, on occasion.

Raskolnikov. Bloom. Mr. Kurtz.

Rochester died in 1680. A full collection of his verse was not published until 1926.

And even then was not allowed into the United States.

Flaubert’s lamp burned with such regularity late at night in his workroom at Croisset that pilots on the Seine were able to take their bearings from it.

Or would Raskolnikov surely at least sometimes see them from other vantage points?