David Markson - This is Not a Novel

And even in the ages to come, men will make of us a song for telling.

Says Helen to Hector of their destiny.

Theodore Dreiser once tried to bribe H. L. Mencken to start a campaign promoting him for the Nobel Prize.

After the burning, Joan of Arc’s remains were dumped into the Seine.

After the burning, Savonarola’s remains were dumped into the Arno.

James Clerk Maxwell died of abdominal cancer.

During the thirty days’ grace between his conviction and the hemlock, Socrates memorized a long poem by Stesichorus.

I wish to die knowing one thing more.

You have only to walk about until your legs are heavy, and then to lie down, and the poison will act. Explains the jailer in Phaedo.

What Pieter Bruegel knew about summer.

Kipling, in Sussex, may have been the first author to actually dispense with horses, owning a motorcar as early as in 1902.

Henry Adams owned a Mercedes in France in 1904.

John Fletcher died of plague. Beaumont’s death was apparently registered with no cause listed.

Trifles, Catullus waved away his verses as. Two full thousand years ago.

The height of absurdity in serving up pure nonsense, or in stringing together senseless and extravagant masses of words, previously seen only in madhouses, was reached in Hegel.

Said Schopenhauer.

In or about December 1910 human character changed.

Yes, Virginia.

Ben Shahn was once an assistant to Diego Rivera. Jackson Pollock was once an assistant to David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Richard Feynman’s roommate, when they were both working at Los Alamos, was Klaus Fuchs.

Raymond Carver died of lung cancer.

Last Week I saw a Woman flay’d, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her Person for the worse.

Why does there appear not to have been one word written about Jesus until he is mentioned by Josephus more than fifty years after his death?

Rembrandt’s father was a corn miller.

Corot more than once added a few brushstrokes and then signed his own name to the work of other painters— who would otherwise not have been able to sell.

The St. Vincent de Paul of painting, he came to be called.

Ned Ludd was feeble-minded.

By far, the two greatest stylists who ever wrote in German were Heine and Nietzsche. Said Nietzsche.

I painted this from myself I was six-and-twenty years old. Albrecht Diirer. 1498.

Nancy Barron, a madwoman at the poorhouse farm in Concord.

Immortalized because Emerson could hear her endless screaming from his study.

Racine died of an abscess of the liver.

A bigot and a sot, Thomas Babington Macaulay called James Boswell.

Simone de Beauvoir died of pneumonia.

Giambattista Vico died of what sounds to have been Alzheimer’s disease.

No great talent has ever existed without a tinge of madness, Seneca says Aristotle said.

All poets are mad, Robert Burton corroborated.

A fine madness, being how Michael Drayton read it in the case of Marlowe.

Gainsborough played the bass viol.

Laird of Auchinleck.

Written with the imagination of a drunken savage. Said Voltaire of Hamlet.

There is no foulness conceivable to the mind of man that has not been poured forth into its imbecile pages. Said Alfred Noyes of Ulysses.

Tom Macaulay, he was commonly called.

Jacques Offenbach died of a heart condition.

Jussi Bjoerling died of a heart condition.

Donatello kept extraordinary amounts of cash in a basket hung from the ceiling in his studio. Quite literally for his workmen or friends to take as they saw fit.

Seneca was a usurer.

Ammannato, Ammannato, che bel marmo hai rovinato!

What beautiful marble you have ruined. Said contemporary Florentines of his Neptune Fountain in the Piazza della Signoria.

Nothing but a continued Heap of Riddles, Theobald found in Donne.

And death i think is no parenthesis.

At least two people were drowned in the Seine because of the crush along the route of Victor Hugo’s funeral.

Antonello da Messina died of pleurisy.

The maniac who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pieta in 1972.

His counterpart who spray-painted Kill Lies All on the Guernica in 1974-

The second of whom actually later owned an art gallery in S0H0.

Knut Hamsun, at twenty-five, was told he had three months to live because of rampant tuberculosis. And died at ninety-three.

Oscar Wilde wrote Salome in French.

En attendant Godot.

Lawrence Tibbett died after an automobile crash.

If it is art it is not for all, and if it is for all it is not art. Said Schoenberg.

Three or four years after the Civil War, Thomas Carlyle told the American Charles Eliot Norton that slavery should be reinstituted.

Or that blacks should be eliminated altogether.

Starvation and/or massacre being obligingly suggested. Durendal. Olifant.

A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up and be shot at.

Said Hardy when he ceased writing novels after the exorbitant

denunciations of Jude the Obscure.

Andrea del Sarto’s wife, Lucrezia. Could she have conceivably for all the years been misabused?

Elizabeth Bishop died of a cerebral aneurysm.

Elizabeth Bishop’s mother died mad.

Lessing died of a stroke, though already wasted by severe asthma and damaged lungs.

Plotinus died of what was probably throat cancer.

Rafael Sabatini’s father was John McCormack’s singing teacher.

An unforgotten lifetime debt of Writer’s, since adolescence:

To Constance Garnett.

Half-cracked. Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s earliest evaluation of Emily Dickinson.

Cyrano de Bergerac died in an accident involving a falling beam.

Mitsubishi manufactured the torpedoes used at Pearl Harbor.

Porsche manufactured tanks.

O the Chimneys.

Robert Browning died of a heart attack.

This is also a continued heap of riddles, if Writer says so.

Simplify, simplify.

For a time, Rossetti, Swinburne, and George Meredith shared a house in Chelsea.

For a time, Domenichino, Guido Reni, and Francesco Albani roomed together in Rome.

The latter three later despising each other.

Whenever possible, Erasmus sought out Jewish physicians.

Whenever possible, Montaigne sought out Jewish physicians.

Rubens died of arteriosclerosis.

Orwell died of tuberculosis.

Kathleen Mavourneen.

Artemisia Gentileschi. Agostino Tassi.

Sir Thomas Wyatt died of an undiagnosed fever.

Heine died of the spinal paralysis, presumably syphilitic, that had confined him to what he referred to as his mattress-tomb for his last eight years.

Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Theseus.

Didier. Ferol. Langlois.

The next shot went into a brain which was already dead.

Vicente Huidobro died of a stroke.

Did Ben Jonson have any notion that Drummond of Hawthornden was writing all that down?

Darling, you’ll never guess what happened in the men’s room at the New School for Social Research tonight!

Oh, dear. Not all the way down the inside of your pants leg again?

It is not necessary to have dandruff to be a genius, Puccini said.

J started walking home across the bridge.

Beethoven, Gluck, Schubert, and Brahms are buried in the same Vienna cemetery.

Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau are buried in the same one in Concord.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s father was a rabbi.

Marc Chagall was the grandson of a shohet.

Braque, an image of Picasso at the moment of Les Demoiselles d ’ Avignon:

Drinking turpentine and spitting fire.