David Markson - This is Not a Novel

The little Marcel, at fourteen, asked to name life’s greatest unhappiness:

To be separated from maman.

Dear Sir:

I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. Your review is before me. Shortly it will be behind me.

Did the American Indian not have the wheel?

Dies Irae.

A presumptuous mediocrity, Tchaikovsky called Brahms.

Undoubtedly the best woman poet of our time, Hardy called Charlotte Mew.

How does Gertrude know all of the physical details of Ophelia’s death with such exactness?

Soldiers! An innocent man is being degraded! Soldiers! An innocent is dishonored! Long live France!

Zola never met Dreyfus.

Max Reger.

Petrarch’s copy of Virgil, with a marginal note in his own handwriting about the death of Laura in the Black Death, is still extant in a library in Milan.

The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead Did squeak and jibber in the Roman streets.

Or an ersatz prose alternative to The Waste Land, if Writer so suggests.

William of Ockham also died in the Black Death.

Robert Burns had nine illegitimate children.

Goya had nineteen legitimate children, by one wife. And several others otherwise.

Augustus John’s habit of patting every passing London youngster on the head: In case it is one of mine.

Brainsick. Troilus’s word for Cassandra in Troilus and Cressida.

Lowell, Massachusetts, James McNeill Whistler was born in.

Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac was born in.

Dies irae, dies ilia Solvet saeclum in favilla.

In one of his reincarnations, Pythagoras was a fish. And in another a bird. He said.

Met him pike hoses.

In 1537, Francois Rabelais taught a course on Hippocrates at the school of medicine in Montpellier. In Greek.

Diego Rivera’s affair with Paulette Goddard. Diego Rivera’s affair with Louise Nevelson.

Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: The Artist’s Mother.

To be precise.

You ever read that, that Cousin Bettel Should I go on with it?

Virtually every inadequacy in recent French literature is due to absinthe, Daudet said in the late 1800s.

Annals 165. Where Tacitus actually does, does, call a spade an implement for digging earth and cutting turf.

Paul Klee died of cardiac arrest after years of enduring scleroderma.

Sarah Orne Jewett died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Thomas of Celano.

I have wasted all my youth chained to this tomb. Michelangelo protested to Julius n.

Uhomme est ne libre, et partout il est dans les fers.

Why hasn’t Writer ever known? What is the black liquid that spills out of the dead Emma Bovary’s mouth?

O death, where is thy sting at?

Les Rougon-Macquart.

Montesquieu died of pneumonia.

Eliot pursued graduate studies in the philosophy of E H. Bradley, in part at Merton College, Oxford, where Bradley was still a lifetime fellow.

Presumably ignoring the rumor that Bradley went about at night shooting people’s cats.

Wallace Stegner died after an automobile crash.

Bradley died of blood poisoning.

Liam O’Flaherty was shell-shocked on the Western Front in World War I.

Roger Bacon probably did not invent eyeglasses.

Forgetting, when starting to reread The Hamlet, that her name before the end will become Eula Varner Snopes. And that in a later Snopes novel she will shoot herself.

Richard Bentley died of pleurisy.

The maniac who went at Rembrandt’s Night Watch with a bread knife in the Rijksmuseum in 1975.

His counterpart who slashed a Barnett Newman in a different Amsterdam museum in 1986—and another Newman in the same museum a decade later.

No one ever put up a statue of a critic. Said Sibelius.

Elderly, shabby, obscure, disreputable, pursued by debts, with only a noisy tenement room to work in.

Being a description by Gerald Brenan of the man who was writing Don Quixote.

The apparent evidence that two of Cervantes’ sisters, and a niece, and his illegitimate daughter, became prostitutes — and in the very period of the book’s first success.

Frida Kahlo’s affair with Leon Trotsky.

The best French novelist of their era, Gide called Simenon.

Leaving moot the question of which of the man’s more than five hundred novels he had in mind.

Stop pawing me, she said. You old headless horseman Ichabod Crane.

Rilke was devoted to polishing furniture. Jackson Pollock baked pies.

Origen castrated himself.

No artist tolerates reality, Camus said.

Virgil spent seven years writing the Georgics. Meaning an average of one line per day.

Pablo Neruda died of leukemia.

Nazim Hikmet died of a heart attack.

How beautiful yellow is! Says a van Gogh letter.

Sortes Virgilianae.

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight.

Dorothy L. Sayers died of a stroke.

If we regard the Fish as a Divine Life symbol of immemorial antiquity, we shall not go very far astray.

Jack Johnson died in an automobile crash.

Nikos Kazantzakis died of the flu.

Jessie Laidlay Weston.

Laurence Sterne’s realization roughly a third of the way through Tristram Shandy that the book lacks a preface. Whereupon he inserts one right where he is.

Jack Donne’s transparently excessive eulogy for his patron’s young daughter — whom he had never met or even seen.

If it had been written of ye Virgin Marie it had been something, Jonson told him.

William Saroyan died of prostate cancer.

Somerset Maugham once had four plays running simultaneously in London.

How much greater than it already is would the Odyssey seem if there had never happened to be an Iliad for it to be compared with?

St. John of the Cross was the son of a weaver.

J. Robert Oppenheimer died of throat cancer.

Maugham died of a stroke.

At last she grew common and infamous and gott the Pox, of which she died.

Says Aubrey’s Brief Lives of one Elizabeth Broughton.

Paper will put up with anything that’s written on it. Said Stalin.

The best geometer in the world, Hobbes claimed Descartes could have become.

But that he had no head for philosophy.

Kurt Weill died of a heart attack.

Turner was considerably less than fastidious about cleanliness.

The Reader.

Being Aristotle’s nickname at Plato’s Academy.

A colt that kicks its mother.

Being what Plato personally called him after an early disagreement.

Samuel ha-Nagid.

Say it out for God’s sake and have done with it. Said William James to Henry.

Molokai. June 1885. We lepers.

Anagnostes.

No Man is my name, and No Man they call me.

A Walk in the Sun.

A decade after Nelson’s death at Trafalgar, Emma Hamilton died in poverty.

Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Susan Sontag.

St. Catherine of Siena was illiterate.

Kafka was a vegetarian.

The English think soap is civilization. Treitschke said.

Theodore Roethke died of a coronary occlusion.

At least one Boston newspaper suggested in all seriousness that Whitman should be horsewhipped for Leaves of Grass.

Charlotte Salomon died in Auschwitz at twenty-six.

Pavel Friedman died in Auschwitz at nineteen. Or younger.

Would Moe Berg really have shot Heisenberg?

Gongora died of apoplexy.

Balzac wrote more than two thousand characters into his Comedie humaine.

There are 260,430 words in Ulysses.

Calvin died of hemorrhages of the lungs.