David Markson: This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Wrote Heinrich Heine.

The assumption that Shylock is the merchant meant by the title.

James Joyce and Isaac Babel were once guests at the same dinner party.

E come vivo? Vivo.

This is a novel if Writer or Robert Rauschenberg says so.

Golder’s Green, Sigmund Freud’s ashes were buried at.

In the Jewish cemetery where Conchita Supervia is also buried.

Before the Normans brought despair, the Anglo-Saxon word was wanhope.

Edmund Wilson once punched Mary McCarthy in the face.

The frequent stags and deer in Lucas Cranach. Dogs barked when they saw them, someone said.

As birds flying into the cathedral at Seville were said to peck at the fruit in Murillo’s St. Anthony of Padua.

Or other birds in an identical story about grapes in a panel by Zeuxis two millennia earlier.

Greater than any of us, Yeats called Rabindranath Tagore.

Descartes had an illegitimate daughter, named Francine, whom he loved dearly. And who died at five.

Wanhope.

Joan Sutherland’s mezzo, Marilyn Horne was sometimes mindlessly pigeonholed as, early on.

Wagner insisted that Christ was not a Jew.

Though that Brahms was.

Murillo died after a fall from a scaffold.

Rudyard Kipling and Angela Thirkell were cousins.

I am going to drink myself dead, Modigliani made it known.

But died of tubercular meningitis.

Numerus clausus.

Ludwig Geyer.

And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it.

Gladstone read the Iliad thirty times.

Defoe, of the same opus:

A Ballad-Singer’s Fable to get a Penny. All for the Rescue of a Whore.

Benny Goodman died of a heart attack while practicing Mozart.

Eleonora Duse died of pneumonia. In Pittsburgh.

There is no bay across from China, for the dawn to come up like thunder out of, anywhere near any road to Mandalay.

Cousin Ruddy.

I was twenty-five and he was sleeping with all the women, and at twenty-five you don’t stand for that, even from a poet.

Said Marie Laurencin, of a breakup with Apollinaire.

This is even an epic poem, if Writer says so.

Requiring no one’s corroboration.

Thomas Hardy was abusive to servants.

Tolstoy more so.

Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail. Being Samuel Johnson’s précis of the poet’s life.

Despondency and madness. Being Wordsworth’s summation of the end of same.

Henry James once hid behind a tree to avoid having to spend time with Ford Madox Ford.

The actress in Dickens’ life was Ellen Ternan, who was twenty-seven years younger than he. Dickens would leave her a thousand pounds in his will.

Virtually every home in Puritan America possessed a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Let the father of the baby gather cherries for thee!

Bernini walked to the Gesù to pray every evening for forty years.

Cranmer watched Latimer and Ridley being burned at the stake no more than five months before he would be put to death in the same manner himself.

Head Tide, Maine, Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in.

Cuchulain is illegitimate.

Arthur is illegitimate.

Gawain is illegitimate.

Roland is illegitimate.

What is this castle call’d that stands hard by?

They call it Agincourt.

The legend that Tycho Brahe died when his bladder burst after an interminable evening of drinking beer.

Djuna Barnes wrote in bed. Wearing makeup and with her hair done.

Edith Wharton wrote in bed. Scattering pages on the floor for a secretary to retrieve before typing.

Play the man, Master Ridley.

Hank Cinq.

Cavafy died of cancer of the larynx.

Pechorin.

Rarely, if ever, having had it come to mind:

That Marcel Proust constantly wheezed.

Did St. Augustine, who was asthmatic equally?

Ophir, from where gold and sandalwood and ivory and apes and precious jewels and peacocks came. Which is mentioned a dozen times in seven different books of the Old Testament.

And which no one has ever discovered the location of.

Also even a sequence of cantos awaiting numbering, if Writer says so.

Ingres spent fifteen years doing pencil portraits of tourists in Rome.

The bomb in the bar will explode at thirteen-twenty.

Cellini’s narration of the casting of his Perseus.

The inexplicable logic by which Thackeray convinced himself that Desdemona actually did have an affair with Cassio.

Christopher Smart died mad. And in debtors’ prison.

The Gesù, where St. Ignatius Loyola is buried. Bernini’s unimpeachable piety—

Yet the indisputable insinuation of orgasm in his Ecstasy of St. Teresa.

Romain Rolland died of tuberculosis.

Sigrid Undset died of a stroke.

The friendship of Heine and Karl Marx.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir were once teachers in the same lycée.

The greatest lyric poet Germany ever knew, Gottfried Benn called Else Lasker-Schüler.

Who at sixty-four was beaten with an iron pipe by young Nazis on a street in Berlin.

Marianne Moore once read a book on the craft of pitching by Christy Mathewson.

The apparent evidence that Lawrence Durrell committed incest with one of his daughters. Who eventually killed herself.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu died of breast cancer.

La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes.

I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

Says Darwin’s Autobiography.

It is Arnaut Daniel, in Purgatorio XXVI, who was the original miglior fabbro.

Byron knew no music.

Pope knew no music.

Johnson knew no music and very little of art, either.

Ernest Hemingway once challenged Hugh Casey to a boxing match. Casey knocked Hemingway down repeatedly.

Hemingway kicked Casey in the groin.

On an ancient sundial in Ibiza: Ultima multis.

The last day for many.

Fayaway.

Much of what we have of Aristotle was not strictly speaking written by Aristotle at all. But would appear to be classroom notes taken down by others.

Both of Verdi’s parents were illiterate.

Like Abraham Lincoln’s.

Elegies to the Spanish Republic.

From Herodotus, on Thermopylae:

It chanced that at this time the Lacedaemonians held the outer guard and were seen by the spy. Some of them engaged in gymnastic exercises, others were combing their long hair. At this the spy greatly marveled.

The Spartans on the sea-wet rock

Sat down and combed their hair.

Roman Jakobson, when Mayakovsky once read him his newest poems:

Very good. But not as good as Mayakovsky.

For that matter Writer also has backaches.

As did Shelley.

A poet is a waste-good and an unthrift, in that he is born to make the taverns rich and himself a beggar.

Said Robert Greene.

But to speak plainly, I think him an honest man.

Greene also said.

One of Robert Frost’s daughters went insane.

One of his sons killed himself.

Christopher Marlowe, a stage direction:

The Pope crosses himself, and Faustus hits him a box on the ear.

Puccini, sipping coffee, once told Lucrezia Bori that her costume was too neat for the last act of Manon Lescaut, in which Manon is destitute.

And dumped the coffee on her gown.

Verses of Propertius were found copied out on walls in Pompeii.

The seemingly authentic report that a doctor performed an autopsy on the Abbé Prévost after a stroke — to discover that only the autopsy had killed him.