David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

The executioner I have heard to be very good, and I have a little neck.

Ventured Anne Boleyn.

Do it to Julia!

Jeanie Deans. Nelly Dean.

At the age of eight or nine, Richard Brautigan once returned home from school and found that his entire family had moved away without a word.

Still remembered from antiquity:

That Menander was extraordinarily handsome.

Xenophon the same.

Charlemagne had eight legitimate children from four wives.

And ten otherwise.

Caesar’s premature baldness.

Giacomo Meyerbeer, in his early twenties, played the bass drum in a performance of something of Beethoven’s.

And never once came in at the right time, Beethoven said.

Being reminded that the earliest use of writing was in making lists.

For commerce.

I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:

In contemplation of experiments with a new soporific drug, we would appreciate your procuring for us a number of women.

Langston Hughes was a busboy in a Washington hotel when he left three poems beside Vachel Lindsay’s dinner plate — which led to his first publication in white periodicals.

Brautigan lived alone in an empty house for a week before neighbors tracked down an address and took up a collection for bus fare.

The version of the myth that has Odysseus sail far enough beyond the Pillars of Hercules to found what becomes Lisbon.

Richard M. Nixon, after the shooting by National Guardsmen of four undergraduates at Kent State University, re college students protesting the Vietnam War:

Bums.

Was Andrea Mantegna’s Padua fresco The Martyrdom of Saint James , destroyed by a bomb in 1944, perhaps the greatest single loss to art in World War II?

Thomas Hardy’s ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey — but his heart was buried in the Dorchester countryside that he had called Wessex in the novels.

Louis Aragon once threatened to beat up any Paris critic who reviewed his next book. None did.

Chekhov wrote as many as eight hundred short stories.

I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:

We consider the price of two hundred marks per woman excessive. We propose to pay not more than 170 per head. We need approximately 150 women.

The greatest living Englishman, C. P. Snow called Paul Dirac in the early 1970s.

Everything vital in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded religions and composed our masterpieces.

Said Proust.

We owe the invention of the arts to deranged imaginations.

Said Saint-Évremond.

If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth Author were to burn a Julian Schnabel, qualms?

Qualmless.

Marianne Moore wore a Nixon campaign button.

Umberto Eco, asked about the impulse behind writing The Name of the Rose .

I felt like poisoning a monk.

Auden’s Manhattan residence, for years, was in a shoddy apartment building on St. Mark’s Place in Greenwich Village.

Where an earlier tenant had been Trotsky.

Luciano Pavarotti’s apartment on Central Park South had earlier been Sophia Loren’s.

Christmas Day, 800 AD.

Frozen music, Schelling called architecture.

Anne Boleyn’s daughter.

Göttingen, Max Planck died in.

How near to where Anne Hutchinson and fourteen out of fifteen of her family members were massacred by Indians does the Hutchinson River Parkway run?

I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:

We acknowledge your accord. Prepare for us 150 women in the best possible health.

Reichenbach Falls.

A Lucas Cranach woodcut, illustrating a corrosive anti-Catholic tract of Luther’s:

The Pope, athwart a pig, blessing a pile of dung.

At a memorial Mass for Beethoven a week after his death, the music chosen was Mozart’s Requiem .

The report that Ben Jonson could recite verbatim every word he had ever written.

Leibniz died sitting up with a copy of John Barclay’s Argenis in his lap.

E. E. Cummings died after chopping firewood.

Saint Catherine of Siena could read but not write. Her letters and other works were dictated.

A brother of Gaetano Donizetti’s became the ranking bandsman in the Ottoman army.

Donizetti Pasha, being known as.

I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:

Received consignment of 150 women. Despite emaciated condition they were found satisfactory. We will keep you posted regarding the experiment.

Evidently more truth than legend: Euripides, in his seventies, and before his final two years in Macedonia, living in a cave on Salamis with an extraordinary view of the sea, very much alone, disliking visitors, surrounded by books. Quote:

Thinking to himself, and writing.

Elnora Comstock, have you lost your senses?

Tardily realizing — qualms after all.

Author would undeniably be distressed at the loss of Schnabel’s portrait of William Gaddis.

Georg Trakl was a pharmacist.

E. T. A. Hoffmann was a lawyer.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we are abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.

Says Walden .

During his first half-dozen years in New York, Jasper Johns worked as a window dresser.

Applying for a job at Time magazine, John Berryman was asked to submit writing samples.

And was not hired.

At huge expense, the remains of Saint Luke were purchased from Bosnia by the City of Venice in the early Renaissance and received by the Doge in the most solemn of ceremonies.

Whereupon a Benedictine monastery in Padua claimed they already had them.

Kate Smith could not read music.

Whistler, on failing chemistry and flunking out of West Point:

If silicon had been a gas, I would have been a major general.

Middleton Murry’s suspicion that D. H. Lawrence was impotent.

Similar speculations regarding Swift.

And Kierkegaard.

And Thoreau.

And Henry James.

The Metropolitan Opera was on tour in San Francisco at the time of the 1906 earthquake. Awakened at 5:13 A.M., Caruso would later say his first thought was that he was back home in Naples and Vesuvius had erupted. Olive Fremstad would be found in a park clutching roses that had been flung to her on stage the evening before.

Art is not truth. Art is a lie that enables us to recognize truth.

Said Picasso.

If all the Armenians were to be killed tomorrow, and if half the Russians were to starve to death the day after, it would not matter to me in the least. My sole interest lies in writing.

Said the long-since unread George Jean Nathan.

There are no women subjects in Plutarch’s Lives.

White does not exist in nature, said Renoir.

I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:

The tests have been completed. All subjects died. We will contact you regarding a further shipment.

Three full days of national mourning were declared in Chile at the death of Gabriela Mistral.

Gogol briefly taught history at the University of St. Petersburg. One of his students was Turgenev — who later said he had known less than nothing about his subject.

Translator’s English, John Wain called Susan Sontag’s prose.

Glen Ellen, California, Jack London died in.

Tennyson’s father was severely epileptic.

The friendship of Brahms and Johann Strauss, Jr.

Heisenberg, why have you been dancing all evening?

Why not, Dirac? The party is filled with nice girls.

How did you know they were nice before you danced with them?

Paul Morphy died insane. Buddy Bolden también .

I don’t believe in all that creeping Jesus stuff. But the public likes it.