David Markson: This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Thomas Mann died of phlebitis.

The likelihood that Anne Hathaway could not read.

Anne Hathaway.

The perhaps less than idle speculation that Columbus was a Jew.

Space is blue and birds fly through it.

Said Werner Heisenberg.

Ultimately, a work of art without even a subject, Writer wants.

There is no work of art without a subject, said Ortega.

A novel tells a story, said E. M. Forster.

If you can do it, it ain’t bragging, said Dizzy Dean.

Xenocrates died after stumbling against a brass pot in the dark and cracking his skull.

Brunelleschi had a temporary restaurant and wine shop constructed in the highest reaches of the Florence cathedral while building his great cupola — so his workmen did not have to negotiate all that distance for lunch.

Maxim Gorky died of tuberculosis.

Or was he ordered murdered by Stalin?

Baudelaire died after being paralyzed and deprived of speech by syphilis.

I was tired and ill. I stood looking out across the fjord. The sun was setting. The clouds were colored red. Like blood. I felt as though a scream went through nature.

Said Edvard Munch.

Can only have been painted by a madman.

Said Munch of the same canvas.

Pico della Mirandola, not yet thirty-one, died of an unidentified fever.

William Butler Yeats died of heart failure.

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Leigh Hunt once saw Charles Lamb kiss Chapman’s Homer.

Henry Crabb Robinson once saw Coleridge kiss a Spinoza.

Lamb was in fact known to pretend surprise that people did not say grace before reading.

Horse Cave Creek, Ohio, Ambrose Bierce was born in.

Giorgione probably died of plague.

Ninon de Lenclos.

The solitary, melancholy life of Matthias Grünewald. Was he wholly sane?

Is Writer, thinking he can bring off what he has in mind?

And anticipating that he will have any readers?

There is only one person who has the right to criticize me, do you understand? And that is Picasso.

Said Matisse late in life.

Arthur Koestler was an enemy alien in solitary confinement in a London prison at the beginning of World War II when Darkness at Noon was published.

Pope Joan, a.k.a. John VII, 855–858.

Who died when taken by childbirth during a papal procession between St. Peter’s and St. John Lateran.

There is no mention of writing in the Iliad. Any and all messages are passed along verbally.

Indicating incidentally that not one of the Greek warriors, during ten years at Troy, has ever sent a letter home.

Is John 8:6–8 the only place in the New Testament where Jesus is seen writing anything, if only marking on the ground with a finger?

The Salon des Refusés.

Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.

Joseph Conrad died of a heart seizure.

Does Writer even exist?

In a book without characters?

— And who are you? said he. — Don’t puzzle me; said I.

Says Tristram Shandy VII 33.

Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue, said Flaubert.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —

As a sort of mantra, Kant would sometimes recite a list of people who had lived long lives, hoping to match them. He reached eighty.

Gluck’s face was pitted from smallpox.

Haydn’s face was pitted from smallpox.

Mozart’s face was pitted from smallpox.

Ludwig Wittgenstein died of prostate cancer.

My mind and fingers have worked like the damned. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, I devour them with fury.

Wrote Liszt at twenty.

Obviously Writer exists.

Not being a character but the author, here.

Writer is writing, for heaven’s sake.

Landscape of the Urinating Multitudes, Lorca called one of his New York poems.

Unmarried women should not bathe, said St. Jerome. Ever. And should embrace the most deliberate squalor.

The less to breed temptation in the world.

Sappho was small and dark.

Though is made blond and fleshy by Raphael in his Parnassus at the Vatican.

Horace was short and fat.

Admitting this himself in the Satires.

On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.

Paul Celan’s body was not found for eleven days after he stepped off the Pont Mirabeau.

Nelly Sachs died on the day of his funeral.

Only when Euripides was being performed would Socrates go to the theater.

Rossini, on the Symphony Fantastique:

What a good thing it isn’t music.

The Sabine farm.

Which is to say that Writer can even have headaches, then?

Writer can have headaches.

Walter Scott frequently manufactured chapter epigraphs out of whole cloth, saying what he wished said, and then wrote in either Old Play or Anon. as the alleged source.

Paul Robeson died of pneumonia and kidney failure.

The King James Bible, the First Folio — both during James I.

Who on the other hand did not pay Chapman the royal stipend due on his translations.

According to Plutarch, Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times at his death.

Dvořák, to Sibelius: I have composed too much.

Brahms, to Dvořák: You do write a bit hastily.

Norman Mailer’s sixth wife was the same age as his oldest daughter.

O, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

Writer does have headaches.

In fact so did Virgil.

And Wordsworth.

Robert Lowell was in and out of mental institutions repeatedly.

Theodore Roethke was in and out of mental institutions repeatedly.

Roethke at least once taken in in handcuffs.

Madame Butterfly is set in Nagasaki.

And they so eagerly pressed towards the body, and so many daggers were hacking together, that they cut one another; Brutus, particularly, received a wound in his hand, and all of them were besmeared with blood.

Anna Akhmatova died after a series of heart attacks.

A grace to say before reading the Oresteia ?

Before Kafka?

Wee Willie Keeler was five feet four and a half inches tall.

Balzac was five feet two.

Schubert was five one and a half.

Keats was less than five one.

A hyena that writes poetry on tombs, Nietzsche called Dante.

Martin Luther’s own words, re the origin at Wittenberg Monastery of the key principles of the Protestant Reformation:

This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower.

Anne Bradstreet died of what was then called consumption.

Sabrina fair,

Listen where thou art sitting

Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave.

Domenico Scarlatti was known to cross himself in veneration when talking about Handel’s skill at the organ.

This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.

Said Robert Rauschenberg in a telegram to a Paris art gallery.

Piero di Cosimo was found dead at the foot of a flight of stairs.

Hagia Sophia.

A woman named Mrs. Simon:

Who watched an elderly man on a train put his head out a window during an unrelenting November thunderstorm and hold it there for fully ten minutes.

And a year later at the Royal Academy came upon Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed on exhibition.

Chi son? Chi son? Son un poeta.

Che cosa faccio? Scrivo.

Lavoisier was guillotined in the Reign of Terror.

The holy curiosity of enquiry, Einstein spoke of.

Paul Gauguin apparently died of a heart attack.

I pray you, give me leave to go from hence;

I am not well: send the deed after me,

And I will sign it.

When I saw a performance of this play at Drury Lane, a beautiful pale-faced Englishwoman stood behind me in the box and wept profusely at the end of the fourth act, and called out repeatedly: The poor man is wronged.