David Markson - Reader's Block

In Brussels, in 1873, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist and was sentenced to two years at hard labor.

Not long thereafter Rimbaud burned all of his remaining manuscripts. At nineteen. And insofar as is known wrote no more verse.

Mary Shelley was nineteen when she finished Frankenstein.

Je finis par trouver sacré le désordre de mon esprit.

Risë Stevens.

Dewey Dell.

Simeon Stylites, who spent thirty-six years on top of a sixty-foot pillar in the Syrian desert. For most of that time his body a mass of maggot-infested sores.

The maggots no more than eating what God had intended for them, he said.

Henry James was an anti-Semite.

René Char was a saboteur for the Resistance in World War II.

The human skull on that same shelf was given to Reader in Mexico by an archaeologist who had come upon several during a dig.

Its origin should be more intriguing if Reader gives it to Protagonist.

Must We Mean What We Say?

Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius were all ordered to commit suicide by Nero. Each opened a vein.

Lucan was twenty-five. He recited his own verses as he bled to death.

Three years later Nero would be a suicide on his own part.

Presumably Reader will give Protagonist photographs of his son and daughter also. Should he possess certain others?

What mail does he receive?

Anglican. Royalist. Classicist.

Degas was probably impotent.

Berlioz fell in love with Harriet Smithson when he saw her as Ophelia in Kemble’s Hamlet In later life she became a shrew.

Ah, what an artist dies with me!

Rossini wrote The Barber of Seville in less than two weeks.

Welshman. Drunkard. Heterosexual.

Oliver Goldsmith was almost always indigent. Samuel Johnson once rushed money to keep him from being evicted. Goldsmith spent it on drink.

Rilke was eternally someone’s houseguest. Once he had fifty different addresses in four years.

Kätchen Schönkopf.

Frederike Brion.

Lotte Buff.

Lili Schönemann.

Charlotte von Stein.

Christiane Vulpius.

Marianne von Willemer.

Lorenzo Ghiberti devoted twenty-eight years to the East Door of the Florence Baptistry. Michelangelo would say it could have served as the entrance to Paradise.

Five hundred years later, Reader would stand staring where five of the door’s ten panels lay heaped amid muck after having been wrenched away in the Great Flood of November 4, 1966. The night before.

The honor of having been the first documented alcoholic author evidently falls to Aeschylus.

Shaw lived with his mother until he was forty-two. And then had an unconsummated marriage.

John Stuart Mill was Bertrand Russell’s godfather.

James Russell Lowell was Virginia Woolf s.

Maurice Ravel died of a brain tumor.

Will Protagonist have spent time in Italy?

In Mexico?

At seventeen, when she became Abelard’s pupil, Heloise was already fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

Balzac wrote eighty-five novels in twenty years.

And made uncountable revisions in the proof sheets of each.

Thomas Wolfe was an anti-Semite.

Robinson Crusoe is on his island for twenty-eight years, two months, and nineteen days.

Fray Luis de Leon.

Would Protagonist’s son or daughter one day want his books?

Thackeray’s wife was insane. But was cared for in a private home rather than an institution.

Judah Halevi.

Bitter Honeymoon.

Ella Ferris Pell was buried in a pauper’s grave.

Her Salome.

Auschwitz. Dachau. Treblinka. Maidanek. Sobibor. Chelmno. Mauthausen. Ravensbriick. Birkenau. Belzec. Theresienstadt.

There is no verifiable portrait of Jane Austen.

An otherwise anonymous Madame Delphine Delamare, who after numerous adulteries as the wife of an inattentive country doctor committed suicide with poison in 1850.

And became the model for Emma Bovary.

I declare to you before God, and as an honest man, that your son is the greatest composer I know, either personally or by name.

And Buchenwald. Six miles from Weimar. On what had been a pleasant wooded hillside.

The more significant women in Protagonist’s life?

Once, obviously, more of an existence than his books and the headstones of strangers.

Children depart, miscellaneous relationships wither. Friends move to distant places.

Friends die.

Salman Rushdie lost the tip of one of his fingers as a boy. As does a character in Midnight’s Children.

Tolstoy was twice cited for bravery as a cavalry officer in the Caucasus.

And Bergen-Belsen. Where Anne Frank died.

Of starvation and typhus.

God wrote the book. I took his dictation.

Cartons like an impermanent sculpture of found objects. On a stairway ending at a sealed-off door.

I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.

Non amo te, Sabidi.

Does a lone woman walk the beach, perhaps, and with a certain regularity, as Reader visualizes one visiting at one of the graves?

A less than anonymous Paris prostitute named Marie Du-plessis, who was dead at twenty-three.

And became the model for La Dame anx Camelias.

Hart Crane committed suicide by jumping from a freighter in the Caribbean.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an anti-Semite.

Molloy. Malone. Estragon.

Simonetta Vespucci. Who was painted by Piero di Cosimo. And one of whose relatives the Americas are named after.

Ilya Ilych Oblomov.

D. S. Mirsky died in Siberia in one of Stalin’s purges.

Sempre libera.

The question of truth versus legend in Alexander’s having razed Persepolis at the bidding of Thais.

The fair certainty that excessive wine played a part.

Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye.

Maribarbola and Nicolasito.

Erostratus burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 B.C., so that his name would be remembered through history.

One of those who remembered it was Cervantes, who lets Don Quixote tell Sancho Panza the story.

And that Alexander was born on the same night.

Adrienne Monnier committed suicide.

Where Reader more broadly sees the cemetery is in a town that in its entirety is comprised of little other than those shoddy small brick row houses and fissured streets. And would seem as if perpetually guised in winter light.

A difficulty, however, being that Reader senses he is evoking the image from half a century or more ago. Where such today?

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Take courage, Charlotte.

Said Anne, dying only six months after Emily.

Back to the things themselves.

The baseball on Reader’s windowsill was hit foul by Ted Williams at Yankee Stadium. Also in antiquity. Reader was with a girl named Fern Winters when it ricocheted off a concrete step and the arm of a seat directly to him.

Sartre called John Dos Passos the greatest writer of their time.

Is Reader perhaps recalling older neighborhoods in certain middling Hudson River towns like Kingston or Catskill or Saugerties, which in those days he knew slightly?

Bucephalas.

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?

Thomas Traherne died in 1674. The manuscripts of his poems, never before published, were come upon on a bookseller’s cart in 1897.

Also in part a commonplace book?

Also in part a cento, as Burton would surely have had it?

The criminality at Aulis.

Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of The Unquiet Grave?

A man will turn over half a library to make one book, Johnson said.

Lucian Freud was once married to Jacob Epstein’s daughter. And once to a woman who later married Robert Lowell.