David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Brahms had blond hair.

As did Mozart.

And Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Hemingway on Sherwood Anderson:

A slob.

The first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species sold out in one day.

Pope Sixtus IV, in the late fifteenth century, was forced to actually issue a bull threatening excommunication for anyone who did not return volumes borrowed from the Vatican library.

Bach had twenty children, of whom nine survived him.

Twenty.

Mozart had seven, of whom two lived.

Vladimir Mayakovsky in New York, in 1925: The filth is worse than in Minsk.

And it is unimaginably filthy in Minsk.

Dostoievsky wrote The Gambler in sixteen days.

Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage in ten. At twenty-one.

Donizetti wrote L’Elisir d’Amore in a week.

The friendship of Crane and Joseph Conrad.

The night before the audition that gained her admission into the Stockholm Academy of Music, Birgit Nilsson milked ten cows on her family’s farm.

The first signed work of visual art, a Greek vase, ca. 700 BC.

Its signature Aristonothos .

Caesar, asked to name the best death:

A sudden one.

Visiting friends, Cyril Connolly was known to mark his place in their books with anything from a string of spaghetti to a leaf of lettuce.

And to depart leaving it there.

Brahms had blue eyes.

As did Abraham Lincoln.

And Hitler.

Giacomo Meyerbeer selflessly gave Richard Wagner all manner of aid at the start of Wagner’s career.

For which in turn Wagner later scurrilously denigrated him in an anti-Semitic pamphlet.

Anonymously.

Rudyard Kipling’s only son was killed fighting with the Irish Guards in World War I.

We have the same job, Virginia.

Said Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to Virginia Woolf.

The only writing I have ever been jealous of.

Said Woolf of Mansfield.

The credible folktale that Marco Polo and his father and uncle, disreputable and queerly dressed, were not recognized and almost denied entry to the Venice family home on their return from the East — after twenty-four years.

Jorge Santayana, it originally was.

Josephine was six years older than Napoleon.

Keep apart, keep apart and preserve one’s soul alive — that is the teaching for the day. It is ill to have been born in these times, but one can make a world within a world.

Wrote George Gissing.

Je suis le savant au fauteuil sombre.

Painting at the court of Sultan Mohammed II in Constantinople, Gentile Bellini improvised a severed head of John the Baptist.

The sultan deemed it unrealistic — and on the spot had a passing slave decapitated for Bellini’s edification.

In his comick scenes he is seldom very successful.

Said Johnson of Shakespeare.

Spurinna.

Charlotte Brontë was four feet nine inches tall.

Sarah Bernhardt was illegitimate.

Marseilles, Rimbaud died in.

Wondering if youngsters still in fact read Marco Polo.

In 1490, a Rome census showed a population of roughly ninety thousand.

Including 6,800 registered prostitutes.

She wouldn’t care a straw whether her husband was an artist or a cobbler, said Haydn of his wife.

Whom he also called an infernal beast.

The Yannis Ritsos verses in which Greek antiquity and the present exist simultaneously — and Phaedra smokes too many cigarettes.

Robert Browning outlived Elizabeth by almost thirty years.

James Dickey flew more than one hundred combat missions in the Pacific in World War II.

Joseph Heller flew sixty in Europe.

Addison and Steele were schoolboys together.

As were Jonathan Swift and William Congreve.

As were John Dryden and John Locke.

Blake’s portraits of Mohammed, Canute, Owen Glendower, Wat Tyler, Lot, William Wallace, and others.

All of whom he insisted had posed for him, in visitations.

The occasions during their collaboration when Braque and Picasso could not always say with certainty which cubist canvas had been the work of whom.

My ex-wife, Picasso would later speak of Braque as.

Beethoven was once seen to throw a dish at a servant. And again at a waiter.

My musical career would no doubt at last become quite charming, if only I could live one hundred and fifty years.

Said Berlioz, when he finally began to receive the critical esteem he deserved.

François Villon’s mother was illiterate.

As was Walt Whitman’s.

As was D. H. Lawrence’s father.

Not long after Scott Fitzgerald’s death, Scribner’s let The Great Gatsby go out of print.

And then rejected the collection called The Crack-Up.

I am Cinna the poet. I am not Cinna the conspirator.

Claude Monet’s love of the sea:

When I die, I should like to be buried in a buoy.

Heinrich Heine’s grave in Montmartre was deliberately despoiled by the Nazis in World War II.

An image that has lingered in Author’s mind: Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, some few years afterward, silently bearing flowers to the site.

Almost nothing whatever is known about Livy.

Rome’s historian has no history, as Taine put it.

Virtually nothing is known about Lucretius either.

Ignoring Saint Jerome’s silliness about him having been driven mad by a love potion.

Zora Neale Hurston’s jesting claim that she once avoided a pedestrian traffic ticket by telling the police officer that since she always saw white people cross on green, she naturally therefore assumed the red was for her.

The Calvary sculpted by Claus Sluter in the late fourteenth century which included the figure of Jeremiah — wearing eyeglasses.

Be silent, good people. I am the Protestant whore.

Called Nell Gwyn out a carriage window to an anti-Catholic London mob.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Whose 1944 Free French reconnaissance flight went down without a sign somewhere off Corsica.

Where they burn books, they’ll end up burning people, said Heine.

In 1821.

The painter’s painter, Whistler called Velazquez.

Everything that Velazquez does may be regarded as absolutely right, said Ruskin.

Leopold Bloom, thinking of the overheard tinkle into a chamber pot as a kind of chamber music .

The likelihood that Joyce adopted the title for his poems from the same pun.

Tamerlane, in 1398, seeking justification in the Koran for an attack on Delhi and given a verse by the mullahs: 0 Prophet, make war upon the infidels and unbelievers, and treat them with harshness.

Whereupon he massacred one hundred thousand unarmed prisoners.

The First Crusade, achieving Jerusalem three hundred years before that, as witnessed by the priest Raymond of Agiles:

Wonderful things were to be viewed. Numbers of the Saracens were beheaded. Others were tortured for several days and then burned in flames. In the streets were seen piles of heads and hands and feet.

A decorator tainted with insanity, Harper’s Weekly once called Gauguin.

Whitman never saw Europe.

Wallace Stevens did not either.

Thunder occurs when clouds collide.

Said Anaxagoras.

Teacher, look! The birds are on fire!

Fra Angelico. Who never painted without first offering a brief prayer.

Bach. Who would not compose without doing so also.

Thanks to God, I have always remained an athiest.

Said Luis Buñuel.

Euripides died in Macedonia. Athens subsequently sent formal emissaries asking that his remains be returned for burial in his homeland. Macedonia said no, electing to retain the honor.

Tchaikovsky’s utterly ill-conceived marriage, which lasted only weeks.

And in fleeing from which he initially attempted suicide — and then underwent a nervous breakdown.