David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Thomas Hardy’s anecdote about looking up a word in the dictionary because he wasn’t certain it existed — and finding that he himself was the only authority cited for its usage.

Realizing that all of Byron’s closest friends — Shelley, for instance — would have addressed him as my lord .

Corinna once defeated Pindar five times in a sequence of poetry contests at Thebes.

Pindar called her a sow.

Emerson was once quoted as having criticized Swinburne.

Swinburne called him a toothless baboon.

Stuff Melville dismissed Emerson as.

I.e., as in stuff and nonsense.

Conducting Don Giovanni in Boston in 1913, Felix Weingartner actually set aside his baton and joined in the applause after John McCormack’s II mio tesoro.

One reason for Author’s procrastination is that he seems not to have had much energy lately, to tell the truth.

For work, or for much of anything else.

At seventy-three, Charles Ives won a Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony.

Which he had written when he was thirty.

Keats. Wondering aloud where Shakespeare was sitting when he wrote To be or not to be .

Now and again, Picasso utilized the whitewashed walls of rented villas to sketch on. Once, a landlord demanded fifty francs for a fresh coat of paint—

Leaving for Picasso’s amusement years later the question of what the man had cost himself.

I can’t listen to music too often. It makes you want to say stupid, nice things.

Said Lenin.

The legend that nine months after his death, Dante appeared to one of his sons in a dream and told him where to find the last thirteen cantos of the Paradiso , until then believed to be unwritten.

Erwin Panofsky was on leave from Hamburg University in 1933, teaching in New York, when he received a telegram stating that as a Jew he was therewith dismissed from his German position.

Affixed to the message on a separate colored strip: Cordial Easter Greetings, Western Union.

Tolstoy, to Chekhov:

You know I can’t stand Shakespeare’s plays, but yours are worse.

A Joshua Reynolds self-portrait — with a bust of Michelangelo in the background.

A Hogarth — with his dog.

Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.

Determined Wernher von Braun.

Nikolay Gogol’s possessions at the time of his death were little better than those of a pauper.

But did include a gold watch that had been Pushkin’s.

In the week before his suicide at seventeen, Thomas Chatterton is known to have lived on a single loaf of stale bread — stale to begin with, being all he could get on credit.

Shakespeare’s first child, his daughter Susanna, was born one day less than six months after his and Anne Hathaway’s marriage license was issued.

Shakespeare’s twins, Hamnet and Judith, were born less than two years later — a little less than three months before he turned twenty-one.

Mozart’s marital infidelities.

The suspicion re Constanze’s.

Author assumes that much of his lack of energy is simply a matter of age. But it’s been excessive, most recently.

Saint Anselm was said to have frequently excused himself from critical church meetings — to sit and read.

Vivaldi was said to have several times abruptly left the altar in the middle of saying Mass — to scribble down musical notations.

Queen Victoria once wrote to Lewis Carroll, at Oxford, asking for a copy of his next book—

And received an inscribed edition of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.

I do at least three paintings a day in my head. What’s the use of spoiling canvas when nobody will buy anything?

Said Modigliani, penniless in Paris in his mid-twenties.

Anna Akhmatova’s memoir, fifty-four years later, of her affair with Modigliani in 1911. Sitting in the rain under an unreliable umbrella in the Luxembourg Gardens and reciting Verlaine to each other — unable to afford anything grander.

Bessie Smith may have been left to bleed to death at a Mississippi roadside after an automobile accident when an ambulance first took away a less severely injured white woman.

Or did she die en route to a second hospital after having been refused admittance at a first?

Winston Churchill failed Latin at Harrow.

As did Napoleon at Brienne.

Living in a single attic room in The Hague for the last seven years before his death at forty-four, Spinoza was known to sometimes go as long as three full months without once stepping out of doors.

Occasions on which the Nazis returned the ashes of murdered prisoners to their families.

Via parcel post.

From an early New York Times review of Prokofiev:

There are a few passages, but only a very few, that bear recognizable kinship with what has hitherto been considered music.

Balzac’s first noteworthy mistress was twenty-two years older than he.

And the mother of seven children.

Except in music, Beethoven had no schooling whatever after the age of eleven.

Having cut, burned, punctured, and tormented the patient, the physician then demands a fee that he does not deserve.

Said Heraclitus, twenty-five hundred years ago.

Equally long ago — when Xenophanes called it unjust that athletes were more highly honored than teachers.

Al Jolson’s first performances, when young and often hungry:

Singing Rosie, You Are My Posy in a Bowery saloon — for a free meal.

Then again, Author doesn’t feel he’s lost much time by not typing, since he’s done a good deal of shuffling and re-arranging of the index cards. Author is pretty sure that most of them are basically in the sequence he wants.

The greatest work of art ever, Karlheinz Stockhausen called the destruction of the World Trade Center.

On the wall in Gerhard Richter’s studio at the time also — a photo of the same event.

If you want to know how you really feel about someone, take note of the impression an unexpected letter from him makes on you when you first see it on the doormat.

Said Schopenhauer.

Alexander Pope, who was denied burial in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey:

Having been Catholic.

Byron, likewise:

Having been Byron.

Nothing preposterous can ever be said that hasn’t already been said by one of the philosophers.

Said Cicero.

The nunnery that was shut down in England in 1520 because — quote — of the dissolute disposition and incontinence of the religious women of the house, by reason of the vicinity of Cambridge University

All four of Richard Wright’s grandparents were former slaves.

Juvenal, explaining the impossibility of living in a second-century Rome rife with vulgarity, noise, theft, myriad nightmare dangers such as fires and/or roofs collapsing, et cetera:

Not to add poets endlessly reading their work even in the worst heat of August.

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.

Said Muhammad Ali.

What cause have I to war at thy decree?

The distant Trojans never injured me.

Says Achilles, in Pope’s translation of the Iliad .

Marthe Boursin, whom Pierre Bonnard used as his model for Blue Nude in 1899.

And for Nude in the Bath —finished in 1946.

Charles Darwin was known to slice a fat book in half, to make it easier to handle.

Or to rip out any sections he was not interested in.

According to a friend who was in the room, Schubert composed his setting for Goethe’s Erlkonig in virtually less time than it had taken him to read the poem.

Scholars who are convinced that Shakespeare must certainly have been a military man. Or a lawyer. Or closely associated with royalty. Or even a Jew.