David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Bizet died of heart disease.

Hobbes died of palsy. At ninety-one.

Russell died at ninety-eight, of bronchial pneumonia.

Janáček died of bronchial pneumonia.

Scott died of the effects of a stroke.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Said Cesare Pavese.

The chimney smokes and I leave the room. Why do you think it a great matter?

Asked Marcus Aurelius.

He was gone in time not to be old.

Said Henry James of Stevenson’s death at forty-four.

I have lived long enough: my way of life

Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf.

Smetana died mad. From syphilis.

James died of a stroke.

Gainsborough, on his deathbed, to Joshua Reynolds:

Goodbye till we meet in the hereafter — we and van Dyck.

Shaw, Kipling, Housman, and Stanley Baldwin were among Thomas Hardy’s pallbearers.

Chaucer may have died of plague.

Sir Philip Sidney died of a sword wound in the thigh.

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Lautréamont died of tuberculosis at twenty-four.

Bonington died of tuberculosis at twenty-six.

Delacroix died of what began as a neglected cold.

Wittgenstein played the clarinet.

Lowry played the ukulele.

Emmy Destinn died of a stroke at fifty-one. Toscanini, Puccini, and Caruso had all been in love with her.

Hic jacet Arthurus Rex, quondam Rex que futurus.

The last book Freud read before his death was La Peau de chagrin by Balzac.

The last book Kafka read before his death was Verdi by Franz Werfel.

A man without feet, walking on his ankles.

Someone insisted having seen at Hiroshima.

There is no drinking after death.

Say Beaumont and Fletcher.

We shall receive no letters in the grave.

Said Johnson.

Samuel Richardson died of a stroke.

Henry Fielding died of dropsy.

There he stood, suffering embarrassment for the mistake of thinking that one may pluck a single leaf from the laurel tree of art without paying for it with his life.

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.

Georges Seurat died of what was probably meningitis.

Does Writer still have headaches? And/or backaches?

As from the start, affording no more than renewed verification that he exists.

In a book without characters.

Not being a character but the author, here.

Turning older or no.

Writer is writing, is all. Still.

Chi son? Chi son? Son un poeta.

Che cosa faccio? Scrivo.

The act of painting transforms the painter’s mind into something similar to the mind of God.

Said Leonardo.

God, that other craftsman.

Said Picasso.

I am God.

Said Matisse.

— And who are you? said he. — Don’t puzzle me; said I.

You are no a de wrider, you are de espider, and we shoota de espiders in Mejico.

Copernicus died of apoplexy.

Rimbaud died of cancer of the bone.

Or of syphilis.

Farewell and be kind.

Say the last words of the original edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Farewell as many as wish me well.

Say the last words of The Unfortunate Traveler.

El Greco was buried in a Toledo monastery in 1614. Four years later, for reasons not recorded, his body was removed from its vault.

To where, no one has learned since.

Did you ever see anyone die? Well, then I pity you, poor Severn.

Everywhere have I sought peace and found it only in a corner with a book.

Said Thomas à Kempis.

Protagoras died in a shipwreck.

Frater, ave atque vale.

Charleville.

Also there is Writer’s tendonitis.

Likewise again merely serving to ratify his existence.

Ben Jonson died partly paralyzed from strokes.

And in penury.

Jane Austen died of what was called neuralgia.

More recent speculation leaning toward lymphoma.

Escritor. Scrittore. Écrivain. Scriptor.

Hugh of Lincoln.

Simon of Trent.

Six centuries after Marathon, Pausanias was still able to read the names of the Greek dead engraved on columns at the site.

Eight centuries after the death of Pindar he was able to visit his tomb in Thebes, still then extant.

And death shall have no dominion.

Grover Cleveland Alexander died alone in a Nebraska rooming house.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, as seen by John O’Hara in the year or two before his death:

A prematurely little old man haunting bookshops unrecognized.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death.

Said Hemingway.

Longfellow, Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Franklin Pierce were among Nathaniel Hawthorne’s pallbearers.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The fear of death distresses me.

Emerson also later attended Longfellow’s funeral, but after his own lights had dimmed:

The gentleman we have just been burying was a sweet and beautiful soul; but I forget his name.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

Watching the burning of Carthage in the Third Punic War, Scipio the Younger quoted Homer on the fall of Troy — and then wept.

At realization of Rome’s own mortality, Polybius says.

Longevity all too often means not a long life, but a long death.

Said Democritus.

We ought to leave when the play grows wearisome.

Said Cicero.

Likewise Writer’s pinched nerve.

We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

I am real! said Alice, and began to cry.

Cervantes died of diabetes.

Or of cirrhosis of the liver.

Blake died of gallstones.

Scipio the Younger having been a grandson, not a son.

The hearsay, first recorded by a Stratford vicar fifty years later, that Shakespeare died of a fever after a night’s carousing with Jonson and Michael Drayton.

Dostoievsky died of a lung hemorrhage.

Tolstoy died of pneumonia, with a nudge from age.

Sir Thomas Browne’s will asked that his copy of Horace be placed on his coffin in the grave.

Botticelli spent his last years on crutches.

And on charity.

Botticelli.

Niels Bohr died of a stroke.

Why is there no explanation in Deuteronomy for Moses being made to die after Pisgah and not being permitted to cross over into the Promised Land?

How many People of Israel were there, in the Exodus?

Picasso died of heart failure, in part brought on by acutely congested lungs.

Matisse died after years as an invalid following operations for duodenal cancer.

La Derelitta.

But no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.

Beethoven died of dropsy, after having gone through pneumonia and jaundice.

Franz Grillparzer wrote Beethoven’s eulogy. Schubert participated in the funeral.

Twenty months later Grillparzer wrote Schubert’s epitaph.

Schwanengesang.

The Grosse Fuge.

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.

So many are dead that were young.

Or yet again, Writer’s sciatica.

Plato died at eighty or eighty-one, while attending a wedding.

The sun is larger than the Peloponnesus.

Allowed Anaxagoras.

This story of Jesus has helped us a lot.

Allowed Pope Leo X.

Or sometimes of course even a comedy of a sort, if Writer says so.

Death’s Jest-Book.

Only three people followed Stendhal’s bier.

His longest obituary contained three lines.

One misspelled his name.

Three.

There is no contemporary reference to François Villon after January of 1463, when he was thirty-two and had already at least twice been arrested for having killed.