David Markson - The Last Novel

Ingres’ judgment that the finished version ought to have been removed from the Louvre or even hidden away altogether:

Is it in such horrors that we should find pleasure? Art should teach us nothing but the Beautiful!

If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.

Said a 1920s Texas governor opposed to the teaching of foreign languages.

Persia, as it was still then called, Doris Lessing was born in.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

Because bookshops are among the very few places where one can spend time without spending any money, George Orwell noted, any number of practically certifiable lunatics are guaranteed to be regularly found in most of them.

I’ve finished that chapel I was painting. The Pope is quite satisfied.

Wrote Michelangelo to his father, after four years’ effort — and with no further need to let fall brooms or lumber.

So impoverished was Linnaeus as a university student that the closest he could come to repairing worn-out shoes was to stuff the holes with paper.

The general acceptance that it was Antonello da Messina who taught Venice the Flemish method of painting with oils rather than with tempera.

Venice — and thus Italy.

More floggings than meals.

Haydn remembered from his childhood.

Trying to imagine E. M. Forster, who found Ulysses indecorous, at a London performance of Lenny Bruce — to which in fact he was once taken.

Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported Nathaniel Hawthorne — who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked at the profusion of naked statues.

January 22, 1945, Else Lasker-Schüler died on.

Raskolnikov. Minus the last two letters, the word translates as dissenter.

While the pseudonym Gorky means the bitter.

Fifty years after combat in World War I, David Jones could still be momentarily panicked by an unexpected explosive sound like that of a backfiring truck.

And now we three in Euston waiting-room.

Latin, Greek, Italian, and German, George Eliot read.

Latin, Greek, Italian, and French — Mary Shelley.

Hindi, not English, Rudyard Kipling’s first language was.

People who pronounce the word ask as if it were spelled with an x.

As for that matter it was, until the late sixteenth century.

If God had not created breasts, I would not have become a painter.

Renoir once unseriously announced.

A woman’s breast or a commonplace milk bottle — my feelings remained the same when painting either.

Corot soberly insisted.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls —

Which Novelist after a moment realizes may sound like a line of Beckett’s, but is actually something he himself has said in an earlier book.

The name Copperfield came from a sign Dickens had noticed on a shop in a London slum.

Chuzzlewit likewise.

Nothing but obscenities and filth.

Being all Conrad could find in D. H. Lawrence.

Disgust and horror, recorded Abigail Adams after a blackface performance of Othello:

My whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona.

The revolver with which van Gogh shot himself had been borrowed. Van Gogh having claimed he wished to fire at crows that were annoying him as he painted.

The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

Said Arthur Honegger.

Remembering that before writing Ben Hur, Lew Wallace had been a Union general during the Civil War.

Remembering that Abner Doubleday had been the same.

The endless commentary, and analysis, and even retelling, in Clarissa. Anyone reading it just for the story would hang himself, Johnson said.

Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?

James Thurber said Harold Ross had to ask.

Roughly two-thirds of the paintings described in the corrected second edition of Vasari’s Lives — finished in 1567 — would appear to no longer exist.

Hamlet. A boring play full of quotations.

Swinburne’s delirium-tremendous imagination, Hopkins called it.

Grant Wood’s sister, Nan, and a dentist named McKeeby. Who posed for American Gothic.

In Cedar Rapids.

July 4, 1934, Hayyim Bialik died on.

The letter announcing the first acceptance of a poem by Francis Thompson never reached him.

Thompson being so indigent at the time that he literally had no address.

Poe, in his late thirties a half-century earlier — Unable even to afford postage to put his manuscripts in the mail.

For poor people, sick or lame, or travelers.

Advertised the Savoy, a charitable residence in sixteenth-century London — which also saw fit to take in struggling authors.

Thinking of them for so long as essentially literary characters that one has to force oneself to recall that Dante actually knew the Paolo of Paolo and Francesca.

Goya died at eighty-three.

Having had to read lips for the last thirty-six years of his life.

Borges at eighty-six.

Having had to be read aloud to for almost as long.

Ovid’s poem about his sweetheart Corinna’s near-fatal abortion — dated ca. 23 BC.

The child was mine — or so I at least

do think.

Baudelaire’s addiction to laudanum.

Coleridge’s. De Quincey’s.

Poe’s.

The Nike of Samothrace, in the Louvre, which was excavated in 1863 — in more than one hundred fragments.

Newspapers expressed such indignation over the ostensible immorality in Richard Strauss’s Salome at its 1907 American premiere that the opera was withdrawn after a single performance and not produced again at the Metropolitan until 1934.

Diseased and polluted. Indescribably, yes, inconceivably, gross and abominable. Unspeakable.

Read a small portion of what the New York Times had to contribute.

Aristide Maillol’s practice of repeatedly urinating on his bronze sculptures.

To add patina.

If you value my work, please, do not knock.

Requested a notice on Hermann Hesse’s door in Ticino.

Gérard de Nerval, in some of the milder moments of his madness — known to toss such money as he possessed into the air for anyone’s taking in restaurants and coffeehouses.

Anne Sexton’s periods in mental institutions.

Only native-born citizens in ancient Athens were allowed to own property.

Meaning that no less a personage than Aristotle, from Stagira, could not.

The nunnery on Montmartre, mentioned a few years earlier by François Villon, where in 1503 it was discovered that the abbess and several nuns had borne children — and still others were pregnant.

A fiend of a book. The action is laid in Hell — only it seems places and people have English names there.

Said Dante Gabriel Rossetti of Wuthering Heights.

Olive Fremstad. Mary Garden. Ljuba Welitsch. Karita Matilla.

Wagner played the piano badly.

Berlioz not at all.

For safety’s sake during the bombings of World War II, the Elgin Marbles were removed from the British Museum and stored deep in the London subway system.

While the French Resistance during those same years was using the Lascaux cave as a place in which to cache weapons.

Tchaikovsky was found weeping after he had written the death of Lisa in The Queen of Spades.

Georges Bernanos was married to a direct descendant of a brother of Joan of Arc.

A simple creature unlettyrde.

Julian of Norwich called herself.

The most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.

Echoed Jane Austen — four hundred years afterward.

Pastor Martin Niemöller — who spent seven years at Sachsenhausen and Dachau.

After having been a German U-boat commander in World War I.