David Markson - Reader's Block

And with but one wench in the house between them, in John Aubrey’s phrase.

Fletcher alone being a cousin of Phineas and Giles, however.

A recording of Bella figlia deWamore, with Beniamino Gigli, Amelita Galli-Curci, Louise Homer, and Giuseppe de Luca. Dated December 1927.

Ergo, by one chance in thirty-one, possibly recorded on the day Protagonist was born.

Hugo de Sade. S

imon de’ Bardi.

Camus called Faulkner the greatest modern novelist.

But then named Pylon and Sanctuary as the best of his books.

Living a full life span, parents who will still have died too soon to learn what their children will truly become.

The identities of their ultimate defeats.

Han Van Meegeren was found out only when he was accused of having sold Dutch masterpieces to Hermann Goering in World War II. To prove they had been rather less than that, he diligently forged one additional Vermeer.

A. E. Ellis was who?

Harold Patrick Reiser.

Carrying groceries, a newspaper, an inexpensive bottle of wine. Protagonist evading splattered slush from passing vehicles at the highway.

Then along the barely discernable path to the room that had once been a garage at the rear of the less than beguiling house.

Room, or rooms?

Conrad Aiken’s father shot his wife and then himself. Leaving it to Aiken, at eleven, to climb a flight of stairs after hearing the shots and walk in on the bodies.

Katherine Anne Porter was an anti-Semite.

Lady Caroline Lamb.

Annabella Milbanke.

Jane Elizabeth Scott, Lady Oxford.

Augusta Leigh.

Claire Clairmont.

Marianna Segati.

Margarita Cogni.

Teresa Guiccioli.

Sergei Rachmaninoff was so depressed at the failure of his first symphony that he gave up composing. And had to undergo hypnosis to start again.

D. H. Lawrence’s father was a coal miner.

Henry Moore’s father likewise.

Much as the Nazis tried to make use of him, Nietzsche had in fact referred to earlier German anti-Semitism as both damnable and poisonous.

Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot in French, not English. Godot does not verbally suggest Dieu.

Laura and Beatrice. The latter having died at twenty-four.

A woman kneeling at a grave. A woman walking on a beach.

Der Tod und das Madchen.

Who does walk the winter beach at water’s edge in the distance far ahead of Protagonist?

He is completely alone here now.

Memento mori.

Emmanuel Ringelblum and his wife and young son were executed in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944. Some of his Notes had been buried in milk cans.

Jane Ellen Harrison.

Courbet’s Sleeping Women.

Bernard Buffet’s Sleeping Women.

The Knave of Sceptres, Reversed: 111 News, Displeasure, Chagrin, Worry.

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

It is impossible for man’s happiness to be in this world. Said Aquinas.

Skokie, Illinois.

Missolonghi.

Jacqueline Picasso shot herself.

For Protagonist’s again distant literary past:

Malcolm Lowry: I have a funny story to tell you, about something that happened while you were out.

Protagonist: Happened? Oh, damn, I can smell it all over the apartment. You didn’t drink my shaving lotion?

Courbet’s Origin of the World.

Carl Sandburg was the one poet who would probably gain from translation.

Said Frost.

Philip Larkin was an anti-Semite.

Areopagitica.

Heiligenstadt.

He hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in his imagination.

Francis William Bourdillon. Edward Rowland Sill. Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Winifred M. Letts.

Carel Fabritius was killed at thirty-two in a gunpowder depot explosion.

Not sorting books and phonograph records merely, but the narrowing residue of an entire life? Papers, files of correspondence?

Photographs of anyone other than his children, are there?

Are there manuscripts?

Pliny the Elder died of asphyxiation after landing a boat to get a closer view of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

Fritz Wunderlich died in a fall down a flight of stairs.

Is there a typewriter?

John Heminges and Henry Condell.

And why has Reader only this tardily determined that Protagonist will have had five or six books dedicated to him in that other incarnation also?

Even if he will not be certain he has copies of all of these in among his cartons any longer.

I think: Is it the blue dressing gown, or the white one? That’s very important. I must find that out — it’s very important.

Parmigianino died mad.

Anactoria.

Alan Ladd committed suicide.

My younger and shallower and vainer brother, William James spoke of Henry as.

So worthy a friend.

Chaucer was an anti-Semite.

Kafka died in 1924. All three of his younger sisters would later be incinerated by the Nazis.

Three.

Zinka Milanov. The Nile aria.

Christopher Caudwell was killed while covering a Loyalist retreat at the Jarama River in 1937. On his first day in combat.

Paideia.

Lucia Joyce, institutionalized, when told of her father’s death:

What is he doing underground, that idiot?

Henri Heine, he was naturally called in his decades in Paris.

Kneeling at a grave. Walking a beach.

Eternal devotion beside the point, after Beatrice’s death Dante had at least four children by the never-spoken-of Gemma Donati.

James Joyce’s daughter.

A forty-year-old Olympia portable, in fact. Not even electric.

Modeled after whose?

Pietro Torrigiano took a hammer to a Madonna he had sculpted in Seville when he was not paid what he anticipated.

And was jailed by the Inquisition for sacrilege.

Where in a masterpiece of spiting one’s face he starved himself to death.

Who’s the coon?

Asked Wallace Stevens re a photo of Gwendolyn Brooks.

Proust so admired Whistler that he once stole one of his gloves at a reception for a souvenir.

Gala Eluard, who became Gala Dali. Her affair with Max Ernst. Her affair with Giorgio de Chirico. And cetera, when married or otherwise.

When was the last time Protagonist actually did sit down to a full meal at a better restaurant?

When was the last time he let himself hail a taxi?

Edith Wharton was an anti-Semite.

Máquina de escribir.

Machine à écrire.

Macchina da scrivere.

Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent, Nabokov said.

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Fleeing the start of World War II, Gwen John collapsed and died on a street in Dieppe.

Josef Mengele, M.D.

John Gould Fletcher drowned himself.

Dickens was certain after reading only her first novel that the name George Eliot belonged to a woman.

O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

In a lawsuit that prevented him from teaching in New York in 1940, Bertrand Russell’s writings were described as lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber. Unquote.

May, 1886:

Little cousins,

Called back.

Emily

Vladimir Mayakovsky had an illegitimate daughter in the United States.

I am become death, the shatterer of worlds. Recited J. Robert Oppenheimer from the Bhagavad-Gita at Alamogordo.

Schreibmaschine.

When was the last time Protagonist took a trip? Simply went somewhere?