David Markson - This is Not a Novel

Oswiecim.

Exeunt.

Moliere was never elected to the French Academy. Balzac was never elected to the French Academy.

Was it John Searle who called Jacques Derrida the sort of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name?

I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

Josquin des Prez.

It took ten years after her suicide for Jeanne Hebuterne’s family to allow her remains to be reburied beside Modigliani’s in the Jewish section of Père Lachaise.

Adelaide Procter. Mrs. Henry Wood.

Gericault died after a fall from a horse.

Hindemith died of a stroke.

Nebuchadnezzar. Who razed Jerusalem. And went mad. And ate grass.

Cardinal Spellman of New York once sent Pope Pius XII a Cadillac automobile with solid gold door handles.

Wyatt Earp died of chronic cystitis.

Because night is here and the barbarians have not appeared.

Charles Lamb’s insuperable proclivity to gin, Carlyle termed it.

Frobisher. Hawkins. Drake.

Hitler typed with two fingers. Mencken typed with two fingers.

Beethoven washed excessively.

Penthesilea.

The speculation that Dante spent time in Paris. Or even at Oxford.

The possibility that on a political mission that took him to Florence, Chaucer met Boccaccio.

Charlotte Corday was a great-grandniece of Corneille. And devoted the morning to reading Plutarch at his bloodiest before stabbing Marat.

Or a treatise on the nature of man, if Writer so labels it.

He had catched a great cold, had he no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed. Said Thomas Fuller.

Potatoes were not known in ancient Rome. Tomatoes were not known in ancient Rome. Oranges were not known in ancient Rome.

Hume died of what was probably colon cancer.

Edgar Degas never learned which side won World War I. Piet Mondrian never learned which side won World Warn.

Flicka von Stade.

Manet died of tertiary syphilis.

Truman Capote died of heart disease complicated by drug abuse.

Marianne Moore taught stenography at the Carlisle Indian School, in Pennsylvania, when Jim Thorpe was a student.

And fifty years later would remember that he held a door for her.

Debussy’s first wife shot herself. As had a mistress, earlier.

Caedmon was illiterate.

The rue Descartes, Paul Verlaine died in.

Avenue Emile Zola, Paul Celan’s last Paris address was on.

A calle in Madrid was renamed in honor of Vicente Aleixandre while he was still living there.

Herman Melville Boulevard is where, in Manhattan? Twelve blocks north from the wishful-thinking intersection of Mark Rothko Road and Hart Crane Place.

The poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age, Gibbon said.

But specially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she that was very ambitious, burning in unquenchable desire to bear the name of a Queen.

— Adding up to the sum total of what Shakespeare found in Holinshed from which he created Lady Macbeth.

The friendship of Paula Becker and Clara Westhoff.

Claudia Muzio was illegitimate. Jenny Lind was illegitimate.

Voltaire’s second wife was his own sister’s daughter.

A passing thought of Kurt Vonnegut’s, re Princess Diana:

Do we know if she ever read a book?

Title of an unfinished composition by Charles Ives: Giants vs. Cubs, August 1907, Polo Grounds.

Ives died of heart disease compounded by diabetes.

Well, Bourrienne, you too will be immortal.

Why, General Bonaparte?

Are you not my secretary?

Tell me the name of Alexander’s.

Hm, that is not bad, Bourrienne.

Haydn’s father was a wheelwright.

The legend that Donatello almost supernaturally refused to die until his commonplace crucifix could be replaced by one carved by Brunelleschi.

But go, and if you listen she will call.

Eight people appeared at Robert Musil’s funeral.

E Scott Fitzgerald died of a sequence of heart attacks.

His most recent royalty statement showed seven copies of The Great Gatsby sold during the preceding six months.

The claim that John Wesley preached more than forty thousand sermons.

Marc Blitzstein. Elliott Carter. Aaron Copland. David Diamond. Roy Harris. Walter Piston. Roger Sessions. Virgil Thomson.

All studied with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau.

Dave Brubeck studied with Arnold Schoenberg and with Darius Milhaud.

Corbiere died of tuberculosis at thirty.

Novalis died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight.

Laforgue was twenty-seven.

Basically every justification for persecution on the part of the Inquisition was at hand in St. Augustine.

As anyone’s justification for censorship is ready in Plato.

J. R. R. Tolkien died of a chest infection while hospitalized for something else.

Ausonius once composed a poem to his writing paper.

The literary fame of The Bonfire of the Vanities condemns the taste of its age.

Mary Mapes Dodge.

Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Don’t come to us with your troubles. If you can’t make enough money to live on, you can jump out the window or drown yourself.

Which Maria Callas vehemently denied having said to her mother.

The vasty hall of death.

Emile Verhaeren died in a fall under a train.

Arcangelo Corelli owned paintings by Bruegel and Poussin.

Adrienne Lecouvreur died of what was apparently rectal cancer.

Though in the Cilea opera is poisoned, which had been a rumor.

But in either event was buried by torchlight in a field beside the Seine — as an actress, forbidden sanctified ground.

Maria Caniglia. Magda Olivero. Renata Tebaldi.

One of St. Teresa of Avila’s grandfathers was Jewish.

Jongkind died mad.

Hugo Wolf died mad.

Blake, at their only meeting, re Constable’s pencil sketches: Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration. I always meant it for drawing, Constable said.

The peculiar immortality of Sulpicia. Six love poems, totaling only forty lines, and customarily tacked onto the collected work of Tibullus. For two full thousand years.

Callas died in Paris, of a heart attack. And was buried from a Greek Orthodox church on the rue Georges Bizet.

Tatiana Troyanos died of cervical cancer.

Writer’s pleasure in realizing that the translation of Rabelais he most recently read was done by the father of Tanaquil LeClercq.

The Hay Wain.

Billie Holiday died of a kidney infection after years of heroin abuse.

Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.

Who but my darling Greensleeves!

And Arthur was so bloody, that by his shield there might no man know him, for all was blood and brains on his sword.

Sir Thomas Urquhart. Peter Motteux.

Did Miss Linda Stillwagon ever see the poem?

John Singer Sargent died reading Voltaire.

Please, sir, I want some more.

Does Temple Drake ever go back and graduate from the University of Mississippi?

Merle Hapes. Junie Hovious.

Is it in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Greensleeves is mentioned? Even twice?

Gluck died after a series of strokes.

Worms feed on Hector brave.

Siegfried Sassoon threw his Military Cross into the Mersey in disgust with the waste of war.

Mina Loy, already suffering advanced spinal osteoarthritis, died of pneumonia.

In one of his less balanced periods, Robert Lowell penciled in some revisions in Milton’s Lycidas.

And insisted he was the author of the entire poem.

An anthology of extraordinary suicide notes. Or of any suicide notes. Is there such?

Dorothy Parker died of a heart attack.