David Markson - This is Not a Novel

The ridge beam sags to the breaking point. Adversity.

Renoir suffered from extreme rheumatism and threateningly congested lungs, but died of a heart attack.

Gaetano Donizetti died mad.

Branwell — Emily — Anne — are gone like dreams — gone as Maria and Elizabeth went twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm.

Said Charlotte, late along.

God is necessary and so must exist. Well, that’s all right, then. But I know He doesn’t and can’t. That’s more likely.

Epis.

Eleven of Ernest Rutherford’s students became winners of the Nobel Prize.

Hermann Hesse died in his sleep at eighty-five.

Catullus died at thirty.

Pascal wrote certain of the Provincial Letters twelve times.

Tolstoy did nine versions of his Kreutzer Sonata.

Le Douanier played the violin.

Patrick White died of bronchial collapse resulting from pleurisy.

Manet and Mallarme spent time together virtually every afternoon for twenty years.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was evidently the first person in England ever to receive a ticket for speeding.

Das Glasperlenspiel.

Wittgenstein, it is you who are creating all the confusion!

Suzette Gontard died of tuberculosis.

Thoreau:

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?

Marie Bashkirtseff died of consumption at twenty-four.

August Macke was killed in France in the first weeks of World War I.

Keith Douglas was killed by a mortar fragmentation bomb three days after the start of the Normandy Invasion.

Catalogue raisonne.

The scene in Hades in Odyssey XI where Odysseus tells Achilles of the extraordinary nervousness inside the Trojan Horse.

Except for Achilles’ own son Neoptolemus, who cannot wait to attack.

The assumption, even in much of antiquity itself, that the mythic Horse had actually been some sort of engineer’s device to breach the walls.

Arturo Toscanini died of a stroke.

Guido Cantelli died in an air crash.

Needing a few seconds to remember that it will be that same Neoptolemus who flings Hector’s infant son from the battlements after the Greek victory.

Anais Nin died of cardiorespiratory arrest while enduring metastatic vaginal cancer.

Robert Frost died of a pulmonary embolism while enduring metastatic prostate cancer.

What interests me is the anguish of van Gogh, Picasso said.

Sir James Frazer died blind.

Thoreau died of tuberculosis.

Turner left a serious fortune to a fund for indigent artists. Relatives fought the will and won the money for themselves.

Why does Writer sometimes seem to admire Ulysses even more when he is thinking about it than when he is actually reading it?

A grace to say before reading Elie Wiesel’s Night? Before Celan’s Todesfuge?.

Swinburne died of pneumonia.

Joseph Heller died of a heart attack.

Puccini and Mascagni were once roommates. Mascagni would become a supporter of Mussolini. And finish his life in disgrace in a seedy Rome hotel.

Robert Burns was said to have died of alcoholism and/or venereal disease.

A hundred years later the symptoms were reread as those of heart disease stemming from childhood rheumatic fever.

Jean Armour.

John Bunyan died of an undiagnosed fever after being caught on horseback in a storm.

Kepler died of an undiagnosed fever after a considerable journey on horseback to collect money he was owed.

Whistler died of a heart condition.

Jack Kerouac died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage from cirrhosis of the liver.

The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace.

Astyanax.

As a Marine pilot in Korea, Ted Williams several times flew as Colonel John Glenn’s wing man.

Sophocles played ball with great skill, it says in Athenaeus.

He alters and retouches the same phrases incessantly, and paces up and down like a madman. Reported a pupil of Chopin’s.

Stanislaus Joyce died of a heart condition at seventy. On Bloomsday.

James Thurber died of a brain tumor.

Beau Brummell died mad.

Antoine Roquentin.

Thomas Hobbes did translations of Homer into English in his late eighties. Not particularly well.

Eight Miles of Books.

Aristotle, asked what grows old most swiftly: Gratitude.

The Boudreau Shift.

Hobbes played the bass viol.

Ignazio Silone’s parents died in an earthquake.

James Laughlin once changed a flat tire for Gertrude Stein.

Samuel Beckett once sat through a New York vs. Houston doubleheader at Shea Stadium.

I could die to-day, if I wished, merely by making a little effort, if I could wish, if I could make an effort.

Blake’s insistence that at the age of four he had seen God watching him through a window.

Amy Lowell died of a stroke.

Vesalius was condemned to death by the Inquisition for dissecting humans. But was permitted to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in penance instead.

And then died en route home of overexposure after a shipwreck.

Sestos. Abydos.

St. Francis of Assisi probably died of malaria.

How vain it is, and how futile, to lament the dead. Said Stesichorus.

William Burroughs killed his wife while trying to shoot a glass perched on her head a la William Tell.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead. From papyri and pyramid inscriptions dated as early as 1580 b.c.

Or a contemporary variant on the latter, if Writer says so.

Writer incidentally doing his best here — insofar as his memory allows — not to repeat things he has included in his earlier work.

Meaning in this instance the four hundred and fifty or more deaths that were mentioned in his last book also.

Burroughs died of heart failure.

Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire.

Your last novel was a flop.

All of this preoccupation implying little more, presumably, than that Writer is turning older.

Stockholm, Greta Garbo’s ashes were buried near.

They’re going to cut a street through. They would, Bill said.

Plutarch says that to force himself to study oratory, Demosthenes once shaved half his head — so that he would be too embarrassed to leave his house.

Though with Writer also now recalling the refrain from Dunbar’s Lament for the Makers, about the deaths of such as Chaucer and Lydgate and Henryson and Gower:

Timor mortis conturbat me. The fear of death distresses me.

And what is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?

There is no such thing as a great movie. A Rembrandt is great. Mozart chamber music. Said Marlon Brando.

Eliot died of emphysema in conjunction with a damaged heart.

Pound died of a blocked intestine.

Being less than surprised that Rouault began his career working at stained-glass windows.

She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.

Otello. Verdi was seventy-four. Falstaff. Verdi was eighty.

Office of the Dead.

The friendship of John Donne and Isaak Walton.

Rudolph Valentino died of a perforated ulcer.

Trollope, as remembered by a schoolmate at Harrow: Without exception the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met.

Ben Shahn died of a heart attack after surgery.

Andy Warhol died after gallbladder surgery.

East Coker, for Eliot’s ashes.

Roman Jakobson, in opposition to a novelist, namely Nabokov, teaching literature at Harvard: Should an elephant teach zoology?

Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin were tennis partners.

John Donne. Anne Donne. Undone.

Camoens died unknown and penniless in a plague.