David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Nothing has ever modified the assumption that he died either at blade thrust or on a gallows, however.

François Villon.

Some few decades after its opening, the bones of Voltaire and Rousseau were stolen from the Panthéon.

And discarded no one knows where.

St. Teresa of Lisieux died of tuberculosis.

St. Teresa of Ávila died of a lung hemorrhage.

Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of.

Or even his synthetic personal Finnegans Wake, if Writer so decides.

If only by way of it fitting no other category anyone might suggest.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

It is difficult to find those places today, and you would be no better off if you did, because no one lives there.

Said Strabo of the lost past.

Possibly even then thinking of Ophir.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

Goethe died of what began as a chest cold.

Emily Dickinson died of Bright’s disease.

And how dieth the wise man? As the fool.

Writer’s silent heart attack.

The legend that Pythagoras starved himself to death.

The legend that Diogenes committed suicide simply by holding his breath.

Only against Death shall he call for aid in vain.

Says an Antigone chorus re man’s estate.

It seems to us that spring has gone out of the year.

Said Pericles, honoring war dead.

Dante probably died of malaria.

Raphael died of an unsolved fever.

Or more probably from excessive bloodletting by his physicians.

Ille hic est Raphael.

Virgil was known to cough blood, presumably from tuberculosis.

Which is almost certainly what killed him.

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

— Says Aeneid I. There are tears for passing things, and things mortal touch the mind.

Requiem. Threnody. Dead march.

Dickens died of a paralytic stroke. At dinner.

Mozart died of renal failure from nephritis. Or of a streptococcal infection. Or of rheumatic fever. Or of a cerebral hemorrhage. Or of mercury poisoning. Or of arsenic poisoning. Or of exhaustion.

Or of possible miscalculated bloodletting, like Raphael.

Like Byron.

What artists do cannot be called work.

Wanhope.

Only one person, his secretary, attended Liebniz’s funeral.

One.

Writer’s right-lung lobectomy and resected ribs.

The sound of water escaping from mill-dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things. These things made me a painter, and I am grateful.

Said Constable.

The little Marcel died of bronchial pneumonia, in addition to his eternal asthma.

Bach died of a stroke.

Donne died of consumption.

When the city I extol shall have perished, when the men to whom I sing shall have faded into oblivion, my words shall remain.

Said Pindar.

Non omnis moriar. I shall not wholly die.

Said Horace.

Per saecula omnia vivam. I shall live forever.

Said Ovid.

Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo.

Tell me, I pray thee, how fares the human race? If new roofs be risen in the ancient cities? Whose empire is it that now sways the world?

— Asked one of the fourth-century desert monks, the names of most forever unrecorded.

The time is close when you will have forgotten all things; and when all things will have forgotten you.

Said Marcus Aurelius.

Western wind, when will thou blow

The small rain down can rain?

It is the business of the novelist to create characters.

Said Alphonse Daudet.

Action and plot may play a minor part in a modern novel, but they cannot be entirely dispensed with.

Said Ortega.

If you can do it, it ain’t bragging.

Or was it possibly nothing more than a fundamentally recognizable genre all the while, no matter what Writer averred?

Nothing more or less than a read?

Simply an unconventional, generally melancholy though sometimes even playful now-ending read?

About an old man’s preoccupations.

Dizzy Dean died of a heart attack.

Writer’s cancer.

Christ, if my love were in my arms

And I in my bed again!

Then I go out at night to paint the stars.

Says a van Gogh letter.

Farewell and be kind.

Author has finally started to put his notes into manuscript form.

A seascape by Henri Matisse was once hung upside down in the Museum of Modern Art in New York — and left that way for a month and a half.

The speedometer needle after the crash that killed Albert Camus was frozen at 145, in kilometers — meaning roughly ninety miles per hour.

The driver of another vehicle said the car had passed him going faster than that.

Leonardo da Vinci’s father had four wives.

Not one of whom was Leonardo’s mother.

An early intention was that Hector Berlioz would become a physician.

Until he went headlong out a hospital window during his first dissection.

Author had been scribbling the notes on three-by-five-inch index cards. They now come close to filling two shoebox tops taped together end to end.

Bertrand Russell was twenty-one years older than Wilfred Owen.

And would still be alive fifty-two years after Owen was machine-gunned in France in World War I.

Orchestra play like pig.

Being an Arturo Toscanini explanation of why he would not apologize to his Metropolitan Opera musicians after cursing at them in Italian.

Twenty-five years after she broke off their relationship, Charles Dickens had a tryst with Maria Beadnell, his still-remembered first love.

And found her fat and foolishly affected and wholly witless.

From the earliest biographical note on Rembrandt:

He could read only the simplest Dutch. And that haltingly.

Rembrandt.

Werner Heisenberg was thirty-one when he won the Nobel Prize.

And nine years earlier had been given a grade of C on his doctoral examinations.

By his own admission, William Butler Yeats, at twenty-seven, had not yet ever kissed a woman.

The Bodleian Library at Oxford, in the mid-seventeenth century, exchanged its First Folio Shakespeare for a Third — on the premise that the latter was more complete.

Actually, Author could have begun to type some weeks ago. For whatever reason, he’s been procrastinating.

Karl Marx never in his life saw the inside of a factory.

Visiting Maecenas at Rome, in the decades before the beginning of the common era, Virgil and Horace were able to use his heated swimming pool.

At thirty-seven, in Key West, Ernest Hemingway badly marked up Wallace Stevens’ face in a never fully explained fistfight.

Stevens was fifty-seven when it happened.

One hundred and sixteen thousand viewers had strolled past Le Bateau , the upside-down Matisse, without comment, before it was rehung correctly.

At the age of seven or eight, Sigmund Freud once deliberately urinated on the floor of his parents’ bedroom.

Aaron Copland, on listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony:

Like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.

Mark Twain forgot Becky Thatcher’s name in the eight years between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn . And called her Bessie Thatcher in the later book.