David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Into Savonarola’s Bonfires of the Vanities.

The friendship of Wittgenstein and John Maynard Keynes.

The many to whom, for years, Robert Schumann was known only as Clara Wieck’s husband.

And are you musical too, Mr. Schumann?

Melville, late along, possessed no copies of his own books.

Pope’s legs were so thin that he wore three pairs of stockings to partially disguise them.

Kant, in the same predicament, had to contrive special devices to keep his stockings up at all.

José da Silva, the Portuguese-Jewish playwright who was forcibly converted to Christianity — and then was burned alive by the Inquisition for secretly continuing to practice Judaism.

With one of his plays being performed in a Lisbon theater on the same afternoon.

Sophocles may have choked to death on a grape. Well past ninety.

Any number of literary works were flung into Savonarola’s conflagrations with the rest. With printing still in its essential infancy, how many irreplaceable single copies of Greek and Latin manuscripts were lost?

The fact that Isaac Babel was executed in a Moscow prison cellar.

The strong possibility that the manuscript of a novel confiscated at his arrest still exists in Stalin-era files.

William Harvey’s medical practice fell off radically after the publication of his treatise on the circulation of the blood.

’Twas believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained, explains John Aubrey.

Georges Seurat, who was dead at thirty-one.

And had sold only two paintings in his life.

Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein, who both studied under Leopold Auer.

Who studied under Joseph Joachim.

To whom Brahms dedicated his only violin concerto.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Said Cervantes, in Part II of Don Quixote in 1615.

Said Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621.

Said Saint Ambrose — in the late fourth century.

Raphael’s stanze in the Vatican—

Where horses were stabled during the sack of Rome by armies of Charles V.

Picasso, in his seventies, discussing form and structure in art.

Then tossing aside an ink-stained desk blotter with the comment: Jackson Pollock.

Author still uses a typewriter instead of a computer because?

Can he really say? Why does he still listen to music on 33⅓ rpm long-playing vinyl phonograph records?

The still extant bill of sale for fifty-eight pairs of gloves that Balzac purchased at one time.

Many of Ronsard’s poems were set to music in his lifetime.

Deaf from sixteen, he never heard them.

Giorgio de Chirico’s habit of doing new versions of his better known works, with faked dates decades after the fact, and then insisting that these were the originals.

Ouspensky, at the very commencement of World War I, taking note of a military truck loaded with crutches.

For limbs that had not yet been lost.

In 1827, an earliest Paris production of Hamlet , in English. With Hugo, Dumas, Eugene Delacroix, Berlioz, Alfred de Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, and Gerard de Nerval all known to have attended.

If it would please God that I might go and tend sheep with my sister and brother.

Said Joan of Arc, after her first several victories.

Clemenceau, to a new private secretary:

Certain letters you will have to draft yourself. Now listen: a sentence consists of a noun and a verb. If you want to use an adjective, come and ask me first.

Tolstoy kept a portrait of Dickens on the wall in his study.

Handel hung in Gluck’s bedroom.

Women, in ancient Greece, were not permitted to do the shopping.

Shakespeare’s sonnets, published in 1609, many probably written in the 1590s.

The realization that there had never been a sonnet in English at all until ca. 1540, when Sir Thomas Wyatt translated Petrarch.

Vaslav Nijinsky spent the last thirty-two years of his life in an insane asylum.

Thirty-two.

In addition to his native German, Heinrich Schliemann spoke English, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Polish, Greek, Russian, Arabic, and Latin.

Most of which he had taught himself.

In addition to his native French, Jean-Francois Champollion spoke Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, Chaldean, Sanskrit, Persian, and Chinese.

And possibly others.

For some years, Marcel Duchamp was the second-ranked chess master in France.

Giordano’s Andrea Chénier —which concludes with Chénier and Madeleine di Coigny strolling off hand in hand toward the guillotine.

Who in real life probably never met.

Claudio Muzio. Elisabeth Rethberg. Rosa Ponselle. Zinka Milanov.

Jane Austen, at the thought of attending an opera:

Very tiresome.

Priests ought never to have children — except by married women.

Says Rousseau in the Confessions .

The lunatic woman’s suffrage demonstrator, affronted by its nudity, who repeatedly slashed the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery in London in 1914.

Lucrezia, wife of Andrea del Sarto, model for so many of his exotic Madonnas. Long after his death, a young apprentice is rendering a copy of one in a Tuscany church when an ancient shawled creature who had been at prayer pauses beside him. At last a hand lifts:

It was I, she says, and shuffles on.

Keats showed On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer to Cowden Clarke the morning after he wrote it.

Apparently Clarke did not know the difference between Cortés and Balboa either.

Chapman. Who in his day was far better known as a playwright than for his translations.

And yet existed at times in calamitous poverty.

I am merry when I have nere a penny in my purse.

Says a letter of Thomas Nashe, who himself saw moments that must have sometimes changed his tone.

Xenophanes, who lived to be one hundred.

And buried his sons.

As did Anaxagoras.

Maurice Ravel’s refusal of the Legion of Honor—

On the premise that government had no right to judge artists.

After a bench heaved from a window during a 1527 political uprising in Florence smashed the left arm of Michelangelo’s David , Giorgio Vasari was one of two sixteen-year-old boys who managed to salvage the pieces.

Alexander A. Alekhine.

Undesirable originality, Beethoven’s Eroica was once condemned for.

Obscure, uncouth, barbaric, and affected, someone labeled an early volume of Yeats.

Very great is the number of the stupid. Said Galileo.

There are always more fools in the majority than in the minority.

Said Anatole France.

One of C. P. Cavafy’s earliest pieces of writing, an essay, in English:

Give Back the Elgin Marbles .

I wish women would repeat the Lord’s Prayer before opening up their mouths.

Said Luther.

From a Hemingway letter, on T. S. Eliot:

A damned good poet and a fair critic; but he can kiss my ass as a man.

On Scott Fitzgerald:

A rummy and a liar.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

Begins an Orwell essay dated 1941.

Rank vegetable growth, Rebecca West called the sentences of Henry James. One feels that if one took cuttings of them one could raise a library in the garden.

Brussels, René Magritte died in.

O, what a number of lies this young man has told about me.

Said Socrates, the first time he heard Plato read one of his dialogues.

Says a legend recorded by Diogenes Laërtius.

Author’s pleasure in learning that the main thoroughfare through Copenhagen is named Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard.

The Marquis de Sade, a century and a half before On the Road:

Writing One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom on a single continuous forty-five-foot roll of paper.