David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Wanamaker’s department store, in Manhattan, Richard Strauss once conducted concerts in.

At Actium, what with the torching of a number of his ships, many of Antony’s troops were roasted alive in their own red-hot armor, says Dio Cassius.

What a coarse, immoral, mean, and senseless work Hamlet is, Tolstoy said.

By brooks too broad for leaping

The lightfoot boys are laid. .

Is Clarissa still the longest single novel in the language?

I must dye one day, and as good this day as another.

Says a suicide in Rowley.

Trade is wholly inconsistent with a gentleman’s calling.

Said John Locke.

Salamis, Solon’s ashes were scattered at.

Kipling died of a hemorrhage from duodenal ulcers.

Alfred de Musset died of heart failure.

Lope de Vega wrote what may have been as many as fifteen hundred plays. Of which almost a third survive.

Thomas Eakins made Walt Whitman’s death mask.

Camerado is in no one’s dictionary.

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping

In fields where roses fade.

Edmund Wilson died of a coronary occlusion.

Sir Thomas Beecham died of a stroke.

Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.

Being a fictitious name once used by Coleridge in the dragoons.

Kilgore Rosewater.

Being one used by Kurt Vonnegut in a hospital.

Bix Beiderbecke died of pneumonia while also confronting delirium tremens.

Fichte died of an unspecified fever.

The friendship of René Char and Martin Heidegger.

Charlemagne could read but could not write.

Joan of Arc could do neither.

How old were you, what were you doing, when you heard Lord Byron was dead?

Geneviève de Galard-Terraube.

Oliver Goldsmith played the flute.

Hopp, hopp! Hopp, hopp! Hopp, hopp!

The Pervigilium Veneris.

Gertrude Stein, to Jacques Lipchitz:

Besides Shakespeare and me, who do you think there is?

Luis Buñuel died of cancer of the bile duct and the liver.

Tennyson, at fifteen, etched it with a sharp stone into the face of a boulder in the woods:

Byron is dead.

Samuel Pepys once smacked his wife in the eye.

In point of fact, on December 19, 1664.

And so to bed.

Salvatore Quasimodo died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

I shall look as if I were dead, and that will not be true.

Zara Dolukhanova. Irina Arkhipova.

Tchitchikov.

Stein died of cancer of the uterus.

Berthe Morisot was a great-granddaughter of Fragonard.

And married Manet’s younger brother.

Judah Halevi was trampled to death by an Arab horseman at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Or died in ways unknown at Damascus.

St. Lawrence was broiled on a gridiron in Rome.

Or was beheaded.

William Ernest Henley died of tuberculosis.

At fifty-nine, George Eliot married a man twenty-one years younger than she.

Who on their Venice honeymoon jumped from a hotel-room balcony into the Grand Canal.

Did Professor Bloom take any books with him, do you know?

Someone said he had a twenty-six-volume complete Joseph Conrad. It’s only a weekend cruise.

Conway, New Hampshire, E. E. Cummings died in.

Conway, Massachusetts, Jack Chesbro died in.

Eliot died within months of her wedding, after catching a cold at a concert.

The kingdom of heaven, as described to Rilke by Marina Tsvetayeva after a lifetime of deprivation:

Never again to sweep floors.

Pascal died of abdominal convulsions.

Valéry died of throat cancer.

La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu.

But I always think as we tumble into bed

Of little Willy Wee who is dead, dead, dead.

De Quincey was less than five feet tall.

Hogarth was less than five feet tall.

James Stephens was less than five feet tall.

This is also a kind of verbal fugue, if Writer says so.

If still perhaps less than self-evident to the less than attentive.

B-flat Major, Op. 133.

The realization that Joan was not canonized until two decades into the twentieth century.

Or Thomas More until 1935.

Jesus did not urinate or move his bowels, said Valentinus.

Erasmus died of dysentery.

Luther died of apoplexy.

Mordecai Anielewicz. April 19, 1943:

Nine rifles. Fifty-nine pistols.

These cool blond people make me feel uneasy, said Einstein.

In 1914.

Does Dante want the reader to suspect that Ugolino ate his sons, or not?

I am getting on with my job, said Bernadette of Lourdes.

What is that?

Being ill.

François Boucher died at his easel at sixty-seven.

Painting a backside of Venus.

You can never do too much drawing, Tintoretto said.

In a dramatic, not a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and terror.

Nonetheless this is also in many ways even a classic tragedy, if Writer says so.

He is dead and gone, lady,

He is dead and gone.

Don’t cheer, boys. The poor devils are dying.

As great an artist as ever lived, Mendelssohn called Jenny Lind.

The greatest singer of us all, Callas called Rosa Ponselle.

William Carlos Williams died after a series of strokes.

John Cheever died of cancer that spread from the kidney to the bone.

Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, Melville is buried in.

Woodlawn Cemetery, in Toledo, Ohio, Addie Joss is buried in.

Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!

Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?

Disraeli was thoroughly convinced that Mozart was a Jew.

Cagliostro died in a dungeon of the Inquisition.

German beer music, Nietzsche called Die Meistersinger.

Sde Boker.

A. E. Housman died of a heart condition.

Shostakovich died of a heart condition.

Café Guerbois.

The Bateau-Lavoir.

News that stays news, Pound identified literature as.

Hectic red.

Henry Adams died of a stroke.

Addison died of dropsy.

In search of Eldorado.

And of Ophir. Which, still, no one has ever discovered the location of.

Horace’s father was a manumitted slave.

Chekhov’s grandfather was a serf.

Ivory. Apes. Precious jewels. Peacocks.

Sandalwood.

Bangkok, Thomas Merton died in.

After stumbling into an electric fan while wet from a shower.

Or on the other end of the scale even a volume entitled Writer’s Bloc k — which Writer is willing to wager some petulant soul will have it.

Depraved May.

Zeno was a pupil of Parmenides.

Who was a pupil of Xenophanes.

Who was a pupil of Anaximander.

Says Diogenes Laërtius.

Kālidāsa was the adopted son of an oxcart driver.

Yossele Rosenblatt.

Jack Dempsey died of a heart attack.

Nelson Algren died of a heart attack.

Congreve died after a coach accident.

Why should we honor those that die upon the field of battle, a man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.

Said Yeats.

February 23, 1821.

July 8, 1822.

April 19, 1824.

The calamitous last years of Swift:

Labyrinthine vertigo, deafness, paralysis, aphasia, insanity.

Of Carson McCullers:

Stroke, paralysis, heart attack, breast cancer, brain hemorrhage.

Bertrand Russell, at seventy-six, survived an ocean plane crash in which a number of other passengers were killed.

I know death hath ten thousand several doors

For men to take their exits.

— Says Webster.

James Clarence Mangan. Who died of alcohol or opium or poverty or neglect.

And is alluded to a dozen times in Ulysses.

Giulio Romano.

Who is mentioned in The Winter’s Tale.