David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

When Hölderlin talked to himself it was often as if in a dialogue between two extraordinarily different personalities.

Thomas Love Peacock read voraciously in Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and of course English.

Having left school at thirteen.

There’s nothing to say that hasn’t been said before.

Says Terence in the Eunuch .

We can say nothing but what has been said; the composition and method is ours only.

Says Burton in the Anatomy .

Jonson’s To Celia —Drink to me only with thine eyes.

Which he contrived by juggling fragments from the Greek of Philostratus.

James Ensor’s portrait of himself as a beetle.

Drawn twenty-four years before The Metamorphosis.

Sakyamuni.

Mendelssohn, on Liszt:

Few brains.

On Berlioz:

One ought to wash one’s hands after handling one of his scores.

Paul Robeson’s father was a former slave.

Sigmund Freud was one of those who categorically refused to allow that the William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could have been the author of the plays.

And told Arnold Zweig that it almost made him angry that Zweig believed otherwise.

The Athenian general Phocion, who was interrupted by extraordinary cheering during a speech:

Have I inadvertently said something stupid?

Huckleberry Finn is thirteen.

Raskolnikov is twenty-three.

Winslow Homer was an artist-correspondent at the front during the Civil War.

Schopenhauer was someone else who talked to himself — loudly, on public thoroughfares.

In Wordsworth’s instance the talk meant that he was composing verses — which he completed in his head before putting them down on paper.

Entirely fourth-rate — Tchaikovsky re Handel.

Pushkin’s tentative English — much of it learned by struggling through Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage .

Molly Bloom is thirty-three.

Have the people who conclude that Shakespeare’s plays were written by the Earl of Oxford ever read the poetry Oxford actually did write?

The twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet. Ergo, the twenty-four books of the Iliad and of the Odyssey .

Arranged by editors at Alexandria centuries after the fact.

When you are going to bed on a sleeper car, put your wallet in a sock under your pillow. That way, in the morning you’ll never forget your wallet, because you’ll be looking for your sock.

Said Ping Bodie.

Eliot was not a very experienced writer, he didn’t write very much, he didn’t write very much poetry.

Said Allen Ginsberg.

Every poet is a fool. Which is not to say that every fool is a poet.

Said Coleridge.

Teresa Stratas, who in midcareer took time to work in Mother Teresa’s hospice in Calcutta.

And later in orphanages in Romania.

Was Stalin’s right arm withered, or was it his left?

Jerusalem, Martin Buber died in.

As did Else Lasker-Schiller.

And S. Y. Agnon.

And Yehuda Amichai.

Paradise Lost sold fewer than three hundred copies a year in its first ten years in print.

The Courtship of Miles Standish sold fifteen thousand copies on its first day.

Giacomo Puccini’s fanatic addiction to duck hunting.

There is no peace to be found except in the woods.

Said Michelangelo.

Herodotus claimed that Nebuchadnezzar’s walls at Babylon were thick enough so that two four-horse chariots could traverse them side by side. No one believed him for twenty-four hundred years — until excavation showed them thicker than that.

Swinburne suffered epileptic seizures. Once in the British Museum.

The United States Constitution was formally declared to be in effect in March of 1789. At a celebration in Philadelphia, provision was made for tables serving kosher food.

Van Dyck was known to do many of his portraits in no longer than an hour.

It is wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log hut on the frontier.

Said Emerson.

There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.

Said Tocqueville.

Is Suetonius the first writer ever known to make a reference to Christianity?

Revolting immorality.

Said an earliest Italian response to Rigoletto.

Like mending a sewer and setting it to music.

Said a New York newspaper of the Anvil Chorus in a first American review of Il Trovatore.

Are there still cedars in Lebanon?

Dionysius Exiguus, a monk in sixth-century Rome who calculated the birth of Christ as having occurred 531 years earlier — and for the first time designated the years since as anni Domini nostri.

Is this the little woman who made this great war?

Said Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe.

To celebrate my fiftieth birthday, Hemingway told Charles Scribner, I fucked three times, shot ten straight pigeons (very fast ones) at the club, drank with friends a case of Piper Heidsieck brut and looked the ocean for big fish all afternoon.

Why has Author always been suspicious that that parenthesis may be inadvertently modifying the wrong activity?

And looked the ocean?

For years, Stanley Spencer regularly put on his clothes over his pajamas.

And came and went that way no matter how formal the occasion.

Meleager, who compiled one of the earliest anthologies, indicating how many of Sappho’s verses he had included:

Few. But roses.

I shall never see Atthis again, and indeed, I really long to be dead.

The first painting Gauguin ever sold was to Degas.

Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!

Says Estragon.

Every man is as God made him, and often a good deal worse.

Says Sancho Panza.

William Carlos Williams died at seventy-nine — having lived virtually all of his life within a ten-minute walk of where he was born.

North’s translation of Plutarch, which Shakespeare so heavily depended upon.

And which was actually translated from the French version of Amyot.

Hermann Hesse was at one time a patient of Jung’s.

9 Ridge Road.

Rutherford, New Jersey.

The two hundred extant First Folios.

The forty-six Gutenberg Bibles.

Beethoven. Schubert. Liszt.

All pupils of Salieri.

Antigonus II, who drunkenly told Zeno the Stoic to make any request whatsoever and as king he would fulfill it.

At which Zeno requested that he step outside and vomit.

Baltimore, Edgar Allan Poe died in.

As Heraclitus saw it, Homer should have been driven from the lists and beaten with rods, for all the deceitful and adulterous acts he showed the gods involved in.

A mere trifle consoles us, a mere trifle distresses us.

Said Pascal.

Names are known to this day of artists who painted scenery for Aeschylus and Sophocles.

The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Lübeck in 1601 and 1603.

And in Paris in 1604.

If the sun were to go out, how long would we continue to see the sun?

Why has Author composed that line as a question when he would have known how to calculate the answer by the age of twelve or thirteen?

Eastward Ho! On which Jonson, Chapman, and John Marston collaborated.

And which for years the Oxford Companion to English Literature listed as Eastward Hoe .

Frederica von Stade’s father was killed in World War II. No more than weeks before her birth.

Sunt lacrimae rerum .

A hunchbacked toad.

The playwright-critic John Dennis called Pope.

Sickly, D. H. Lawrence called Yeats.

Mayakovsky angrily condemned the suicide of Sergei Essenin, in print, as an act of cowardice—

Five years before killing himself.