David Markson - The Last Novel

Mark Twain’s pronouncement that the personages in a novel should be alive, except in the instance of corpses — and that the reader should be able to tell the corpses from the others.

Unfortunately not the case in Fenimore Cooper, he determines.

When I was boy, the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land.

Said Sitting Bull.

When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches.

Said Cochise.

Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.

Said Geronimo.

Noting that the first word of English that Robinson Crusoe teaches his man Friday — after the name Friday itself — is Master.

Nathanael West once applied for a Guggenheim fellowship with recommendations from Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, and Malcolm Cowley.

Guess.

Novelist’s own Guggenheim applications, plural, with references equally as impressive.

Guess — six or seven times.

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, tragedy as better, than in actual life.

Says Aristotle.

Marco Polo died three years after Dante.

Horace Greeley died insane.

Future generations will regard Bob Dylan with the awe reserved for Blake, Whitman, Picasso and the like.

Said an otherwise seemingly rational writer named Jonathan Lethem.

D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow.

The 1940s network radio broadcast of La Bohème in which Toscanini could be distinctly heard humming along with Licia Albanese and Jan Peerce as he conducted.

Karl Popper claimed he had written the 480-plus pages of The Open Society and Its Enemies more than thirty times.

We did not ask you white men to come here.

Said Crazy Horse.

A heart attack while swimming, Theodore Roethke died of.

The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government, said Martin Luther King.

In 1967.

Georges Rouault was born during a bombardment in the Franco-Prussian War — in a Paris cellar.

Bob Dylan, as poet:

Sophomoric and obvious, said Ned Rorem.

Bob Dylan, as composer:

Banal and unmemorable, Rorem aussi.

April 21, 1924, Eleonora Duse died on.

For no reason whatsoever, Novelist has just flung his cat out one of his four-flights-up front windows.

Saint-Exupéry wrote Le Petit Prince while living on Long Island.

Well past fifty, Tolstoy began an intensive study of Hebrew with a Moscow rabbi — not very many years after having devoted similar concentration to mastering Greek.

The awareness of not having accomplished anything, and not expecting to accomplish anything in the future, is not so terrible because Tolstoy makes up for all of us.

Concluded Chekhov.

When will you pay me?

Say the bells of Old Bailey.

You go wherever you like. I’m not about to get myself killed for that wife Helen of yours.

Says Agamemnon to Menelaus — essentially about commencing the Trojan War — in the little that remains of a lost play by Euripides.

Act. Then call upon the gods.

Says another Euripides fragment.

That tampon painter.

Joan Mitchel called Helen Frankenthaler.

The friendship of Zola and Cézanne.

Tracing back to when they were boys of twelve and thirteen.

The big tragedy for the poet is poverty.

Said Patrick Kavanagh.

Try to get a living by the Truth — and go to the Soup Societies.

Lamented Melville rather earlier.

Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.

Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.

For a time, at the Tuileries, Napoleon kept the Mona Lisa in his bedroom.

Only this tardily realizing — that if he had not made use of his middle name, among the better-known twentieth-century American poets would be a William Williams.

One of the two listed witnesses at the wedding of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, was the church janitor.

Turgenev was sentenced to a month in jail, and subsequent banishment from St. Petersburg, for the simple act of having written an obituary of Gogol, whose work was considered subversive by czarist authorities.

I absolutely cannot do without it.

Says Tchaikovsky’s diary, about alcohol.

Veronese’s Finding of Moses, at the Prado.

In which Pharaoh’s daughter and her handmaidens are shown in clothing not worn until the Renaissance.

The last time anyone mentioned Erskine Caldwell.

Lorca was thirty-eight when he was murdered.

Everywhere Lorca went he found a piano.

Rafael Alberti remembered of him.

Met him pike hoses.

Had Sir Thomas Beecham ever conducted any Stockhausen?

No. But he believed he had trodden in some.

Before the Euro, the portrait of Yeats on Ireland’s twenty-pound note.

America’s Whitman twenty-dollar bill, when?

The Melville ten?

One of the rare pieces of expository writing by a woman in antiquity — a list of rules for behavior when visiting an exclusive house of prostitution.

Left by one Gnathaena, in third-century Athens, and actually catalogued in the great library of Alexandria until its destruction.

No more than ten or twelve weeks after an actress he had been living with took her own life, Gottfried Benn was engaged to another woman.

1427–1429. Being the closest one can evidently come to a date for the death of Masaccio.

The Threepenny Opera. For which Brecht stole much of the language from someone else’s German translation of the original John Gay version — and for which he was ultimately forced to surrender part of his royalties.

Truth lies at the bottom of a well.

Cicero says Democritus said.

Truth lies at the bottom of a well.

Rabelais says Heraclitus said.

I’ve had it with those cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

Growled Kenneth Rexroth.

Novelist does not own a cat, and thus most certainly could not have thrown one out a window.

Nonetheless he would lay odds that more than one hopscotch-ing reviewer will be reading carelessly enough here to never notice these two sentences and announce that he did so.

God help us, did I not tell your Grace that those were nothing but windmills?

All cats are grey in the dark.

What would non-creative writing be?

George Steiner once casually wondered.

Musicke, the Elizabethan spelling was.

Hydeous. Swolne. Perswasion. Sinne. Subtill.

Brightnesse falls from the ayre.

He would not blow his nose without moralising on the state of the handkerchief industry.

Said Cyril Connolly of Orwell.

Billy Graham’s anti-Semitic exchange with Richard Nixon, as preserved on White House tapes.

E. M. Forster lived with his mother until her death when he was sixty-six.

Children of Palestrina, Verdi referred to Italian composers as.

Bastien-Lepage was dead at thirty-six.

Aubrey Beardsley was dead at twenty-five.

The somewhat notorious soprano Susanna Cibber. Who sang so movingly in an early performance of Handel’s Messiah that a Dublin bishop informed her afterward that any and all of her earthly sins were therewith irrevocably forgiven.

Charlotte Brontë died in March of 1855.

The Reverend Arthur Nicholls, whom she had married nine months before, would live until 1906.

A daughter of Dickens lived until 1929.

After Jean Stafford, vacationing, had explained to a weathered Wyoming ranch hand how she made her living:

That’s real nice work. I reckon you can even always arrange to do it in the shade.

Wondering why it always seems somehow not quite accurate — that Mozart was born only fourteen years before Beethoven.