David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Agatha Christie has been translated into more languages than any other English author except Shakespeare.

Eight minutes, twenty seconds. Give or take.

Boccaccio offered a series of public lectures on the Divine Comedy in Florence as early as in 1373.

Electra, in blue jeans.

Which is not from a Yannis Ritsos poem.

Wordsworth’s illegitimate daughter.

Byron’s.

Shelley’s.

Schopenhauer’s.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem .

Being maried to an author is a very hard life.

Said Nora Joyce.

Saint Teresa’s corpse was twice stolen before it was at last returned to Ávila for burial.

Pindar was buried in Thebes.

According to Pausanias, at a racetrack.

Macaulay insisted he knew every word of Paradise Lost and of The Pilgrim’s Progress by heart.

Benjamin Britten was a conscientious objector in World War II.

Giambattista Vico’s mother was illiterate.

As was his wife.

Diana of the Crossways .

Defoe was nearing sixty when he published his first novel.

Hardy was nearing sixty when he published his first volume of poems.

Benjamin Franklin was still making marriage proposals to younger women in his mid-seventies.

Why should not old men be mad?

Darer, Holbein, and Quentin Massys all did portraits of Erasmus.

Diego Rivera’s 1932 mural in Rockefeller Center. With its portrait of Lenin that he refused to remove.

Whereupon the Rockefellers effaced the entire wall.

The Mexico City Rivera mural that included the phrase Dios no existe.

Which in that case he finally agreed to alter.

Marlowe was two months older than Shakespeare.

As recently as in the year 2000:

A small Cimabue panel of a Madonna and Child discovered under the stairs in a country manor in Suffolk.

Karl Marx reread the Oresteia once every year.

Soutine’s famous Carcass of Beef, which he painted from an actual eviscerated steer in his Paris studio.

And which decomposed to such a degree that neighbors finally brought the police.

Good Lord, how you have to mess about in life!

Said van Gogh.

I paint what I think, said Rivera.

Paganini, who owned a Stradivarius viola, commissioned Harold in Italy because he knew Berlioz needed the money.

And then never performed it because it wasn’t challenging enough.

Toronto, Glenn Gould died in.

Caravaggio’s father was a stonemason.

That lump, Ezra Pound called Robert Lowell.

Oscar Wilde died in 1900.

Bosie Douglas in 1945.

There are 16,696 lines in the Iliad .

I must die; must I then die complaining?

Asked Epictetus.

If your Hercules had his hair cropped, he would not show skull enough to hold his brains.

Said Cellini of a sculpture of Baccio Bandinelli’s.

Two of the thugs hired to castrate Abélard were themselves caught and mutilated. And also blinded.

Stravinsky, born near St. Petersburg, became a French citizen in 1934.

And an American in 1945.

In his manic, suicidal last year, Randall Jarrell was once called upon to introduce Hannah Arendt to a college gathering — and talked for twenty minutes about Johnny Unitas.

Without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew, said Byron after Shelley’s death.

Presumably not remembering that Shelley had deserted Harriet, nineteen and four months pregnant, to run off with Mary, also pregnant — and leaving Harriet to drown herself less than two years later.

Enrico Fermi’s wife was a Jew. When the family left an increasingly anti-Semitic Italy to accept his Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1938, instead of returning they sailed directly to New York — having made plans with virtually no word to anyone beforehand.

Edmund Spenser died in poverty.

But was buried in Westminster Abbey very near Chaucer.

Tom Paine died in poverty.

Five people attended his funeral.

For years, following Pearl Harbor, the Metropolitan Opera left Madame Butterfly off its schedule.

Why did Saint Paul not date any of his letters?

Heinrich Böll was wounded three times as a conscripted German infantryman in World War II.

Debussy, on the personality of Proust:

A bit of the concierge.

Louis Norman Newsom.

A past which was never a present, the historian Grote called the romanticized era of the Trojan War.

Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, and Muriel Rukeyser were at Vassar together.

Being annoyed at Aristotle for mentioning that someone once accused Euripides of having bad breath.

Or does Author more likely mean being amused at being annoyed?

Yet in either instance, why, still, is Author so lacking in energy?

In fact why has Author now and again even caught himself taking a nap, which he cannot recall having ever done before in his entire adult life?

Like his younger grandchildren, for heaven’s sake.

Yeats once proposed marriage to Maud Gonne and was turned down.

And in no time thereafter proposed to her daughter.

Whistler did not get married until he was fifty-four.

Edmund Wilson managed to go through life without reading Don Quixote .

And through a full ten-year period without paying his income tax.

Henriette Sontag, the soprano at the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth — who turned Beethoven to face the audience so that he might see the applause.

A fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.

Bertrand Russell called Christianity.

Emile Zola’s first English publisher spent three months in jail for obscenity.

Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata was once banned from the mails by the United States Postal Service.

Puppies and first operas should be drowned.

Said Carl Maria von Weber.

No painting by Rogier van der Weyden is signed.

No painting by Hugo van der Goes is signed.

William Faulkner once allowed himself to be interviewed on radio during a University of Virginia football game.

And was introduced as a winner of the Mobil Prize.

Gerard de Nerval spent much of the last decade and a half of his life in and out of mental institutions.

Antwerp, Rubens died in.

Tacitus, when young, defending other young writers against the eternal Old Guard:

What is different is not necessarily worse.

Julia Ward Howe was paid five dollars by the Atlantic Monthly for The Battle Hymn of the Republic .

Eliot used custom-made umbrellas with deliberately outsize handles.

So that no one would take one from a cloakroom by mistake, he told Herbert Read.

Julian Schnabel’s claim to The New York Times that his peers among painters were Duccio, Giotto, and van Gogh.

Gabriele Fallopio.

Bartolommeo Eustachio.

Pomes , Bronson Alcott said Whitman pronounced it.

Why is it said of a batter in baseball that he flied out rather than that he flew out?

Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not until they examined the rings that they recognized who it was.

Tolstoy. Tchaikovsky. Lenin. Gorky. Rilke. Einstein.

Each of whom posed for a portrait by Leonid Pasternak.

Plutarch’s report of an epidemic of women’s suicides in Miletus.

And of a law enacted that all suicides must thenceforth be carried naked through the city before burial.

At which the suicides cease.

Theo van Gogh once asked Camille Pissarro to take in Vincent as a boarder.

Pissarro’s wife declined to have such an unbalanced individual at loose among her young children.