David Markson - The Last Novel

Unintelligible, the borrowings cheap and the notes useless.

Said the New Statesman and Nation.

So much waste paper.

Summed up the Manchester Guardian.

Kant’s irrationally compulsive 3:30 PM walk, which it is said he forswore only once in thirty years — on the day when the post brought him a first copy of Rousseau’s Émile.

A German singer! I would as soon hear my horse neigh.

Said Frederick the Great, insisting upon Italian performers for opera in Berlin.

A. E. Housman. Who spent most of his adult life as a professor of Latin.

After originally failing his final exams at Oxford.

What, still alive at twenty-two,

A fine upstanding lad like you?

From the beginnings of the legend of Michelangelo’s sense of his own worth:

He treats the Pope as the King of France himself would not dare to treat him — unquote.

John Donne, near death, as recorded by Izaak Walton:

His sickness had left him but so much flesh as did only cover his bones.

Pausing to speculate about the plumbing of the era — and wondering how frequently Shakespeare might have bathed.

Or even two centuries later, Jane Austen.

Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski.

Rat-eyed, Virginia Woolf called Somerset Maugham.

An old parrot, Christopher Isherwood saw instead.

February 6, 1916, Rubén Darío died on.

Everyone honors the wise. The citizens of Mytilene honored Sappho even though she was a woman.

Said Aristotle.

He who has money is wise. And handsome. And can sing well also.

Says a Yiddish proverb.

Walt Whitman’s claim — never in any way verified — that he had fathered at least six illegitimate children.

The woman named Mercy Rogers, who in the early 1920s when the subject was relatively new, read practically every available book on psychoanalysis — and then put her head into the oven.

Certain men have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously, at their pleasure, so as to produce the effect of singing.

Insisted Saint Augustine.

Englishwomen have big feet.

Nietzsche determined.

Man: But a little soul bearing about a corpse.

Marcus Aurelius says Epictetus said.

Richie Wagner, Charles Ives amused himself by calling him.

Truman Streckfus Persons, Truman Capote’s birth-certificate name was.

He wore a grey suit, black shoes, white shirt, tie and vest. His appearance never changed. He came down in the morning in this suit, and he would still be wearing it the last thing at night.

Said John Huston, re Sartre.

Einstein often went without socks.

The final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent.

Clifton Fadiman said of Absalom, Absalom!

Curiously dull, furiously commonplace, and often meaningless.

Alfred Kazin said of Faulkner in general.

Me, tell you? I don’t know anything about it. I laid down face up and began to sing. Children came like water.

British troops reached Belsen, the first Nazi concentration camp to be reported on, in April of 1945. Forty thousand starving and/or dying prisoners. Ten thousand unburied corpses, corded like wood.

It is my duty to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind, began the dispatch to the London Times.

I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald.

Pleaded Edward R. Murrow, on trans-Atlantic radio, after reporting much the same soon thereafter.

Our worst century so far.

Elizabeth Bishop called that one.

Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

Says a line in Slaughterhouse-Five.

Huckleberry Finn was once banned from the children’s room of the Brooklyn Public Library because — Novelist is quoting here — Huck said sweat when he should have said perspiration.

Wondering if the myth of Dedalus and Icarus has ever been thought of as the first science fiction story?

The only thing that could sound worse in an orchestra than a flute — would be two flutes.

Said Cherubini.

Jean Genet was arrested for the first time — for theft — at the age of ten.

David Garrick’s explanation for the excessive number of bawdy plays on the late eighteenth-century English stage:

Because the first great ruling passion of actors is to eat.

E. M. Forster’s astonishment at learning that telephone wires were not hollow.

Old enough to remember when any number of people seemed to believe something similar — or at the least felt it necessary to shout, when confronted with long distance.

Five or six lunatics, the contributors to the first Impressionist exhibition were called by Le Figaro.

Heine read Plutarch’s Lives for the first time when quite young.

And said it made him wish to leap onto a stallion and ride off to conquer France.

William Blake’s emphatically avowed lack of interest in sex.

The Red and the Black, John F. Kennedy’s favorite novel was.

According to Vasari, Leonardo devoted four full years to painting the Mona Lisa.

The Mona Lisa covers a slight fraction more than five and one-half square feet of surface.

Sarah Bernhardt lost a leg at seventy-one.

And one year later was performing for French troops at the front in World War I.

On a wall in Freud’s waiting room in Vienna:

Bernhardt’s photo.

A man either utterly devoid of sense or one who takes his listeners for fools.

An early critic called Schoenberg.

A debris of sour jokes, stage anger, dirty words, synthetic loneliness, and the sort of antic behavior children fall into when they know they are losing our attention.

The New Yorker called Catch-22.

Lo, there is just appeared a truly classic work.

Wrote Horace Walpole — within one day of the publication of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

Rhoda Broughton’s Dear Faustina, from 1897. Is it the first lesbian novel in English?

Jean Cocteau’s addiction to opium.

Francis Thompson’s.

Modigliani’s. To opium, hashish, and drink.

People who more immediately think of Meursault as a character in Camus rather than as a dry white Burgundy.

Czar Alexis, father of Peter the Great, who in the mid— seventeenth century ordered the destruction of all musical instruments in Russia.

Pope Leo XII. Who in the 1820s issued an edict forbidding the waltz in Rome.

Magnificently, awe-inspiringly ugly.

Henry James called George Eliot.

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-etre hier, je ne sais pas.

Not until a year after his burial at Sag Harbor did someone notice that the title of The Recognitions was misspelled on the back of William Gaddis’s headstone.

The true/untrue/pleasant-in-either-case tale that Salvador Dalí had been noticed gazing in almost hypnotic fascination at a melting wedge of Camembert on a dinner table not long before painting the limp watches in The Persistence of Memory .

I am extremely happy — until further notice.

Says a letter of Berlioz about his romance with Harriet Smithson.

An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks almost as much as you do.

Said Dylan Thomas.

But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.

Suggested J. C. Squire.

The seeming likelihood that Pythagoras is implying that the world is round — in the mid — sixth century BC.

He had not escaped the common penalties of transgressing the laws of strict purity, wrote Alexander Thayer re Beethoven.

Which is to say — he had syphilis.

Guillaume Apollinaire authored a considerable amount of art criticism, particularly as an early champion of Cubism.